Works
  • Gail Morris, "Axis", 2025
    Gail Morris
    "Axis", 2025
  • Gail Morris, "Banasari", 2025
    Gail Morris
    "Banasari", 2025
  • Gail Morris, "Bird of Paradise", 2025
    Gail Morris
    "Bird of Paradise", 2025
  • Gail Morris, "Côte d’Azur", 2025
    Gail Morris
    "Côte d’Azur", 2025
  • Gail Morris, "Freeway of Love in a Pink Cadillac", 2025
    Gail Morris
    "Freeway of Love in a Pink Cadillac", 2025
  • Gail Morris, "Green", 2025
    Gail Morris
    "Green", 2025
  • Gail Morris, "Into the Mystic", 2025
    Gail Morris
    "Into the Mystic", 2025
  • Gail Morris, "Le Fromage", 2025
    Gail Morris
    "Le Fromage", 2025
  • Gail Morris, "Summer Solstice", 2025
    Gail Morris
    "Summer Solstice", 2025
  • Gail Morris, "Dancer", 2023
    Gail Morris
    "Dancer", 2023
  • Gail Morris, "Shoreline Trees", 2023
    Gail Morris
    "Shoreline Trees", 2023
    Sold
  • Gail Morris, "They Have a Pool", 2023
    Gail Morris
    "They Have a Pool", 2023
    Sold
  • Gail Morris, "Yellow on the Left", 2023
    Gail Morris
    "Yellow on the Left", 2023
  • Gail Morris, "Foggy Day in Carmel", 2022
    Gail Morris
    "Foggy Day in Carmel", 2022
    Sold
  • Gail Morris, "Bel Air", 2021
    Gail Morris
    "Bel Air", 2021
  • Gail Morris, "Fogbank", 2021
    Gail Morris
    "Fogbank", 2021
  • Gail Morris, "French 75", 2021
    Gail Morris
    "French 75", 2021
  • Gail Morris, "Take the Blue Train", 2021
    Gail Morris
    "Take the Blue Train", 2021
  • Gail Morris, "Causeway", 2019
    Gail Morris
    "Causeway", 2019
  • Gail Morris, "Sundown", 2019
    Gail Morris
    "Sundown", 2019
    Sold
  • Gail Morris, "After Dawn", 2018
    Gail Morris
    "After Dawn", 2018
  • Gail Morris, "Distribution and Cuts", 2018
    Gail Morris
    "Distribution and Cuts", 2018
  • Gail Morris, "Sequence of Green", 2018
    Gail Morris
    "Sequence of Green", 2018
  • Gail Morris, "Sunbox 301", 2018
    Gail Morris
    "Sunbox 301", 2018
  • Gail Morris, "Love is Here to Stay", 2007
    Gail Morris
    "Love is Here to Stay", 2007
  • Gail Morris, "Sunlight", 2006
    Gail Morris
    "Sunlight", 2006
Biography

Gail Morris captures the soothing exuberance of the Western landscape by reducing each experience to its visual and emotional essence.

Landscape painter Gail Morris has won many prestigious awards for her paintings, and her work can be found in private and corporate collections throughout the United States, Asia, and Europe. Her career as a visual artist has taken her on a number of extraordinary adventures around the globe, from Micronesia to South America and West Africa.

Morris always loved painting, but after university she became a photographer and then a photojournalist. When she moved to California, she started working in the movie business as a location scout. All of these careers let her travel and photograph amazing areas, but they didn’t allow her the time to paint.

While scouting in New Mexico she saw the work of the Taos Founders. The high desert vistas there were so inspiring that she decided to paint again. Back in San Francisco she discovered Russell Chatham, Wayne Thiebaud and Richard Diebenkorn, all of whom would influence her later work.

As time permitted, she took workshops with well-known landscape artists and by 1999 she was represented in several galleries. A few years later she met and studied with Wolf Kahn and went wherever he taught painting workshops. His loose brushwork and explosive color steered her toward a more abstract style of painting, and she maintained a long correspondence with him.

In her first book, Wolf Kahn wrote, “The landscape paintings of Gail Morris are spare and elegant. Economical divisions set off the near from the far spaces. Color relations are abstract and resonant. These pictures are evidence of a sensuous and celebratory response to nature and to life in general.”

For the past decade her paintings have included pristine rural locations as well as industrial areas. Her last show was titled ‘The Jack London Series” and featured the flat warehouses, train tracks and waterways near the Port of Oakland. For her, every painting, no matter how abstract, always starts at a specific location.

Morris says, “Twenty years ago I painted to show my interpretation of the landscape. Now I distill it to its visual and emotional essence. I let color and composition create an unexpected order on the canvas. I put paint on, then scrub it off, and I play with it until it seems right. Sometimes it goes quickly, most times it takes a lot of work.

As my old friend Henry Miller said, ‘To paint is to love again.’ When I can allow the painting to take the lead, when I follow it until it ends, I know exactly what he meant by that.”

Morris works and lives in California with her husband.

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