James Morrison would make a great high school art star. His tight rendering skills, saturated colours and kitsch adolescent subject matter—the things one is expected to leave behind on entering the ‘grown up’ world of art school—are the classic hallmarks of teen art geeks. Morrison commits all of the atrocities that are normally guaranteed to drive the art academic to head-in-hands despair; buff models straight from the pages of glossy fashion magazines, butterflies, Australiana, castles, ghosts, technicolour sunsets and that greatest of all offences—fairies. Morrison makes no concession to ‘refined’ tastes, nor does he subscribe to the ‘less is more’ school of aesthetics, but one finds oneself not just forgiving the artist his transgressions, but rather applauding them.
The works on paper and small scale oils that made up Morrison’s solo show at Silvershot are quite fabulous, in both senses of the word. Benevolent polar bears live alongside Siberian tigers and rainbow coloured serpents, jellyfish fall from the sky like snowflakes, giant ants wage war on humanity and fantastic bugs flit among invented flowers and exquisitely observed hibiscuses. The black and white ink drawings are superbly handled and demonstrate an astonishing richness of line and texture (be still my printmaker’s heart!), particularly in Little Desert in which foliage and feathers are celebrated in unrelenting detail. The gouache and watercolour snakes in Cottonmouths and Wahgi Valley appear to glisten like enamelled jewellery in a spectrum of colours, as though Morrison had just been given a full set of seventy-two Derwent pencils and was determined to use them all.
But the obvious star of the show was the epic The Great Tasmanian Wars: fifty-five panels and 16.77 metres of the