Gail Morris American

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 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.