Evening Telegraph (First Edition)
Documentary looks at life of famed Angus landscape painter
A DOCUMENTARY on the life of Angus landscape artist James Morrison had its world premiere in this year’s online Glasgow Film Festival.
Eye of the Storm, screened last night, is a portrait of a figure seen as one of the nation’s greatest contemporary watercolourists.
In the film, Glasgowborn Morrison reveals his inspirations in a career that took him from the coasts of his adopted home county of Angus to the open and dangerous expanses of the Arctic.
He also speaks with heart-breaking candour of the “terrible loss” of his sight and the deteriorating health that would lead to his death last August, at 88.
Award-winning local film-maker Anthony Baxter described the two-year project to make the piece during the latter stages of Mr Morrison’s life as a “privilege”.
Eye of the Storm was commissioned by BBC Scotland, which will screen it this spring.
Morrison studied at Glasgow School of Art in the early 1950s, and founded the Glasgow Group of artists with Anda Paterson and James Spence.
He was an Academician of the Royal Scottish Academy and a member of the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour.
In 1965, Morrison joined the staff of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, remaining there for more than two decades before painting full time.
“My whole life I was mixed up with painting,” he tells film-maker Baxter.
Of his Arctic adventures, which added stunning polar pieces to his remarkable portfolio, he says: “I went knowing nothing at all about what I was in for.”
Most poignant are his thoughts on the “terrible loss” of his sight.
“The very thought of coming in here (the studio) and not being able to pick up a brush really terrifies me,” he tells Baxter.
The film follows preparations for what turned out to be the artist’s last exhibition at the Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh in January last year.