But Morley, now 70, has found a little peace and quiet–not to mention a spacious, light-filled studio–in his formerly ecclesiastical abode. And his current retrospective exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London (“Malcolm Morley: In Full Colour” runs through Aug. 27) finally gives him the homecoming that an artist who was in on the ground floor of both pop art in the 1960s and neo-expressionism in the ’70s–and who won the very first Turner Prize in 1984–deserves. The barrel-chested, pugnacious-looking Morley–he could pass for one of Lennox Lewis’s cornermen–has also discovered domestic happiness with Dutch-born Lida Kruisheer, whom he married (and who settled him down, a bit) a few years after he bought the church in 1985.
Morley’s approach to painting is as unusual as his biography. Originally directed toward art by a kindly jail warden, he was fascinated early on by both the idea of the romantic, loner artist (he was especially impressed by “Lust for Life,” Irving Stone’s novel about Vincent van Gogh) and the discipline involved in painting realistically. After a foray into an elegant, restrained white-on-white version of abstract expressionism in the early ’60s, Morley started to insert fragmentary ship images into dourly tonal abstractions. The ships became whole boats, and one day he decided he wanted to paint a big cruise ship. So Morley, who had immigrated to New York in 1958, walked down to the Manhattan piers to find one. The trouble was, as he puts it in the retrospective’s catalog, “one end [of the ship] is over there, the other end is over there, a 360-degree impossibility.” So he bought a bright postcard at the shipping office and took it home to copy–which for Morley consisted of drawing a ruled grid on top of the postcard, drawing a similar grid but with bigger squares on a canvas and then replicating the source image, unit by completely finished unit.
Although Morley’s style has changed several times since the cruise-ship pictures, he’s been constantly obsessed with the question of where, and how, an artist’s creativity actually gets into his work. “I wonder,” he says during a break from the studio, “about what is ‘copying’ and what is not copying. Can something creative happen without the intent of being invented? Can something come into painting when you’re trying your best not to be inventive or creative? When I’m copying, it’s really sheer concentration on painting; I’m mixing color, mixing paint at a certain velocity and density, and I need it to go down in a certain way. If I look at a painting from the side, I don’t want to see bits of paint sticking out. I want to be painterly without being painterly.”
The result in the mid-’60s was a spate of hyperrealistic, deliberately banal but blindingly full-color pictures of cruise ships, par-ties aboard cruise ships and resort-life vignettes such as “Beach Scene” (1968). These paintings–embraced by the critics as genuine pop art–made him a star. But Morley, an inveterate envelope-pusher, was compelled to move on. His paint got thicker, the copying purposefully shakier, and he even constructed a few canvases in accordion bends to mimic those themed skeins of postcards you can buy off any tourist rack. Pretty soon Morley’s subject matter ranged from his ever-present ships to tigers, birds, the Lone Ranger (holding a dildo instead of a gun) and ritual Indian dances in Arizona. Eventually–as in “Floundering Vessel With Blue Whales and Viking Ships” (1998)–his painting technique became an absolute symphony of delicate copying, Pollock-like splashing and geometric graphic design, all held together by what might be called the rigorous discipline of a wild man. In other words, what looks like Morley’s putting anything he damn pleases into any part of his paintings is actually as deliberate and hard-earned as a jazz master’s riff, which might sound as if he’s playing whatever notes he feels like. “It’s about the amount of seeing per look,” he says. “It’s like the idea of eating a meal with a knife and fork–a mouthful at a time. If you try to eat the whole plate at once, you can’t digest it.”
Of course, Morley wouldn’t be Morley without another abrupt turn. Last year he discovered some old cut-fold-and-paste model-airplane cards that took him back to the illustrations of fighters in The Illustrated London News he loved as a kid, and to the prized model of the HMS Nelson he lost when a V-1 rocket destroyed part of his childhood home during the Blitz. These days Morley likes to copy the airplane cards onto big canvases, all the while relishing their garish colors, ham-handed cartoonishness, defiantly unpoetic prose (“Nose: fold & glue”) and even the original artist’s clunky printed signature (“Mudget”). Like much of Morley’s work, the pictures should look silly, and perhaps they do at first glance. There’s something, however, in his deceptively deadpan rendering–a kind of willed naivete–that speaks convincingly of an artist who can do just about anything he wants with paint, struggling to keep things strange, and fresh. Morley admits he worries that paintings like “Spad XIII” (2000) might turn out to be a “dead end.” But he’s been down that road before, and the seeming cul-de-sac has always, in the end, opened up into something new. In Morley’s studio-in-a-church, his dictum–“It’s one thing to see it, and quite another to see it and paint it”–is much more than a mere article of faith.
