THE JOY OF JOLOMO'S SCOTLAND
As one of Scotland’s best-loved artists, he’s sold thousands of paintings (Sting and Madonna are fans). But not one John Lowrie Morrison hangs in a public gallery — is he right that they only want angst and gloom?
AWEEK ago John Lowrie Morrison was approached by a woman in Perthshire clutching an iPhone with a painting from the 1970s on the screen. Could the artist confirm that this was his work?
Her question requires a little context. If this piece of art were indeed a ‘Jolomo’ original then more than four decades would have passed since he had worked on it. During times of peak production, Morrison was completing three or four canvasses a day and painting six days a week.
In other words, he was producing hundreds of paintings every year and would have worked on many thousands since his brushes last alighted on this one.
Adding somewhat to the challenge, the woman’s hand was covering most of the picture.
‘All I could see was one wee poppy with the grey background,’ says Morrison. ‘I went “ooh, that’s definitely mine”.’ It is not simply that he recognises his own style and signature colours.
‘It’s more than that. It’s as soon as someone shows me something I have done it takes me right back, it’s as if I’d just painted it and I remember it right away. It is part of you even though you have painted thousands of them.
‘It’s instant. It’s not like “maybe it’s mine and maybe it’s not.” You’re just transported back to it right away.’
Not only is Morrison among Scotland’s most prolific painters, he is also one of the nation’s most successful. He still produces one, sometimes two, paintings a day and yet it is photographs and sketches for future works which litter his studio in Argyll, not completed ones.
Where are all the finished pieces? Some hang on the walls of celebrities such as Madonna and Sting. Hundreds have been packaged up and shipped at great expense to aficionados of his work in the US, Canada and Australia. Thousands more take pride of place in the homes of ordinary Scottish folk, many of whom pay in instalments at whatever rate they can afford.
MORRISON at 70, still tickled pink that his work is so coveted – is always willing to talk terms. One place where his work does not hang, however, is on the walls of any publicly-owned gallery in Scotland.
Though he may well remember his first sale – a tenner for a piece called The Purple Mountain 54 years ago – he has long since lost count of the thousands of subsequent ones.
Most of these paintings are vivid ‘croftscapes’ as Morrison likes to call them, celebrations of Scotland’s rugged beauty, there to be gazed at and enjoyed and, implicitly at least, to praise the Almighty behind such scenic gorgeousness. The artworks have earned their creator a very comfortable living, an OBE and countless admirers.
Yet not one has proved worthy of purchase for the nation – which rankles.
‘No public gallery has bought my work...this is not good,’ he says.
‘Public galleries should be collecting the best or most successful work of “the day” so that future generations can look back.’
A few years ago Morrison presented four large landscapes ‘for the Scottish people’ to the Scottish parliament in Edinburgh. In 2013, he gave another landscape to Clydebank Museum after it displayed 150 of his paintings one summer. The exhibition attracted more than 20,000 visitors.
Two universities have awarded him doctorates for his significant contribution to Scottish culture.
And yet, from the ‘big boys’ of the art establishment, nothing.
‘I don’t know why they are not going after my work,’ he says at first – then adds: ‘It seems it’s only angst and darkness that they want... not something that lifts people’s spirits.’
In that endeavour, the Glasgowborn former art teacher and father of three succeeds with almost metronomic regularity.
His current exhibition, Croftscapes and Flowers at the Strathearn Gallery in Crieff, Perthshire, contains most of the Jolomo hallmarks: the brilliant blues of the sky, the whitewashed gable ends of croft houses which look like they have stood forever and the fascination with particular locations which recur in his work through the decades.
One of them is Grogport in East Kintyre. ‘I can’t stop painting it. I did the first Grogport painting in 1973. It’s just two or three wee croft houses and a bridge and a couple of trees and there’s just something about it that grabs me and I keep going back.’
Sure enough, Grogport is depicted in the latest collection along with scenes from Barra, Iona, the Uists, Mull and Gigha – all familiar haunts for a painter drawn as if by magnetic forces to the west of the country and the Hebrides.
Indeed, it was ever thus. Even as a child, gifted a Winsor & Newton box of paints for his eighth birthday, it was not the gritty scenes of Glasgow’s Maryhill which stirred the artist in him but a visit to the Isle of Harris and the croft where his father grew up.
‘When I saw the croft it went right into my psyche. I just loved the form of it. Relatives showed me pictures of it when it was a blackhouse – not a two-storey building with dormers but a thatched blackhouse with just a door and two windows, one either side. That stuck in my mind.’
And so, even as he grew up in thrall to the artist Joan Eardley who depicted the Glasgow of his 1950s youth so memorably, it was the fresh landscapes of the countryside, not the dirty, depressing city which pulled him to paint.
It was in Latin class at Hyndland Prep School in the early 1960s that Morrison invented the sobriquet Jolomo – using the first two letters of his three names – but not until 1985 that it became the signature on all of his art.
And yet, perhaps, the real signature is the image itself. He says: ‘What I’m really aiming at all the time is a beautiful painting and beauty, for me, is the balance of colour, balance of texture and balance of your composition.
‘If there is some sort of harmony in it, that’s what I try to get and if I don’t get it I scrape the painting off or paint over it. I’m quite ruthless at times. In fact, the family sometimes see me and go “Dad! What are you doing! What are you scraping that one off for?”.’
More surprising still, perhaps, given the four-figure price tag for a piece, is his willingness to abandon a painting if he is interrupted.
‘Sometimes my wife Maureen
comes in with something really important, I’ve got to speak to someone on the phone and I speak to them and put the phone down and I look at the painting that I’ve just been in the middle of and I can’t go back to it. I scrape it off and do something else with it.’
Not that Morrison need worry overmuch about the pennies these days. He left the teaching profession in the mid-1990s after persuading himself he could survive on his art alone and now comfortably clears seven figures every year. And yet, says the former Lochgilphead High School art master, he still misses the classroom, even the ‘scallywags’.
‘I think they give you energy,’ he says.
They also seemed to appreciate that this Mr Morrison was an actual painter, like Rembrandt or Van Gogh, and rapidly developing into one of Scotland’s most celebrated ones. Did he paint in class?
‘I did a bit. Not a lot. I kind of felt dodgy about it. You’re doing it in school time and that’s not really what it’s about. You’ve got to educate people.’
He adds: ‘I don’t think it’s the way to teach children but it’s good to let them see you’re an artist.’
Free from the shackles of the ‘day job’, Morrison’s routine in his studio next to his home in Tayvallich, Argyll, has been the same for years.
‘Although I have a title or a theme [for an exhibition] and maybe an area like the Isle of Tiree, when I come in in the morning I don’t know what I’m going to paint. I’ll have hundreds of photographs, hundreds of sketches and I just go through them at my big table and suddenly something will jump out at me and I think “oh, I’m going to do that”. Something just speaks to me. It’s just the way I work.’
Does he ever draw a blank and find nothing worthy of committing to canvas?
‘Never. There is always something. I’m up at seven, I’m out here [in the studio] at 7.30, 8 o’clock and raring to go every day.’
Morrison does admit, however, that his energy levels have dipped somewhat from the days when he used to complete four works in a single session, working into the night as if compelled to devote every waking hour to his talent.
‘I tend to fade off in the afternoon now. It’s maybe just a physical thing, I don’t know. At the moment I’ve got sciatica and work is lifting heavy frames and heavy pictures. The reason I’ve got sciatica is because I lifted a box full of oil paints which I shouldn’t have. It’s a dead weight.’ Still the landscapes keep coming. Next in the pipeline is an exhibition of scenes from Carbeth, Stirlingshire and from Glasgow’s West End, – the latter almost a belated acknowledgement of the unforgettable vistas littered with Victorian splendour which were on his doorstep when he was growing up. ‘I suppose when you get to my age – I’m 70 now – you start looking back a lot and that’s really grabbing me right now. In a way I wish I’d done it way back but then you just do what comes along, it comes from your spirit.’ Yet, for all the thousands of his own landscapes, Morrison has long harboured a fear that this traditional art form is ebbing away, that art schools now favour conceptual artists often steeped in pretension.
OF the Turner Prize, the award most commonly associated with this movement, he says: ‘They think they’re moving things on but they’re not.’ And, much as he admires Sir Antony Gormley, creator of the Angel of the North, even he, says Morrison, can take concepts too far. His latest exhibition features, among much else, mud and sea water filling the entire floor of a room at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.
‘I know what he’s trying to do and all that but it seems to me just as if it’s like Hollywood. You’ve got to do something incredible that’s going to knock everybody out and I’m not all that keen on that. Maybe I’m a shrinking violet.
‘It doesn’t catch me. I just look at it and go, “Oh right, Ok, it’s a smelly bit of earth, you know?”.’
Morrison prefers to communicate in plainer language, both through his art and the sermons he regularly gives as a lay preacher for the Church of Scotland. The message, he says, does not need to be a complicated one.
‘I am trying to do a beautiful painting and at the same time show God’s glory if you like, that’s what it’s about.’
It is for Morrison, at any rate. For Scotland’s public galleries, which have yet to buy a Jolomo, it may be about something else.
A spokesman for the National Galleries of Scotland said its museums were ‘home to works by a range of artists from Scotland and abroad, including big names and rising stars.’ The spokesman added: ‘While our remit is broad, our budget is limited. We don’t have plans to acquire a work by John Lowrie Morrison. As with any successful Scottish artist, there is always the possibility that his work could enter the national collection in the future .’
Certainly his work has entered the national psyche. The woman with the painting on the screen of her mobile thanked the artist profusely for his confirmation, then walked away beaming with joy. She owned a Jolomo.
The Croftscapes and Flowers exhibition at the Strathearn Gallery in Crieff runs until October 20.