Pink Narcissist

Melbourne artist Richard Morrison tells Michael Magnusson his latest exhibition creates a drama far removed from the scandals that have beset his work in the past.

The drama surrounding Morrison’s current exhibition, Pink Narcissist, is down to his collaboration with theatre director and playwright Kevin McGreal.

“He’s been a friend for a while and is giving his perspective of my 20 years of gay painting,” Morrison explains.

“He’s very much part of the gay culture too and has chosen the work from his perception of what it means to him as a gay man and is using my work to say how he feels.”

With McGreal’s background in theatre, he has created a veritable ‘performance’ from Morrison’s work for the exhibition, using his very literary perception.

McGreal’s choice of the theme and the ideas and concepts behind the work gives it a different edge, according to Morrison: “His interpretation of my work is very much about the story.”

Morrison says McGreal sees the paintings as portraying “personalities and how they shape themselves to be seen by the world”, which he finds a great learning experience compared to how he normally views his art.

It is a far cry from how his art has been viewed by others, too. No stranger to controversy, Morrison’s frank and often confronting depictions of male sexuality have come under fire on a number of occasions.

The most exasperating was in 1996, when three paintings of male nudes forming part of his exhibition A Scarlet Brushstroke at the Horsham Art Gallery were removed following complaints by members of the city’s pipe band attending the annual Highland Ball held one evening at the gallery.

But not all controversy works against an artist; Morrison says he relished the controversy surrounding another of his exhibitions at Richmond’s Charles Nodrum Gallery.

“Charles Nodrum’s gallery is a bit more controversial,” Morrison says, “in showing more radical sorts of painting. It’s a bit more dangerous than a lot of the commercial galleries.”

“And it was quite a radical exhibition. One of the paintings, called ‘The Mount’, was of anal intercourse. What I liked about that painting was that it’s where I am at as a controversial, radical painter myself.”

With solo shows nearly every year Morrison, however radical, is an established member of the Melbourne art scene and enjoys regular sales.
“I had a show called What Boys Do after Dark at Rhumberellas and sold pretty much everything,” he says.

There have been a number of sales at the current exhibition as well.
“People know my artwork principally because of the colour,” he says. “Colour is something distinctive to my work. The subjects also reflect a lot of the documentary aspects of the gay scene.”

Morrison first started creating gay themed paintings in 1992, with paintings of drag queens. “Then I started painting a lot of the saunas and clubs and became a graphic documenter of the night life of Melbourne.

The bright and liberating colours in Morrison’s works reflect the happiness he feels about his sexuality.

“In a few paintings of Club 80 and the saunas, where it is a very dark environment, my colours are very bright. So it’s a sexual metaphor for the mood of exhilaration and the sexual enhancement – and colours reflect that mood – but the actual environment is quite dark.

“I think because I only came out later in life, the sense of exhilaration and freshness about my experience is reflected in that colour and ‘joie de vivre’.

“I haven’t really stepped into that dark moment of being angst-ridden about my sexuality. I’m very happy being gay.”
Morrison describes his art as “almost like a visual diary”.

“It reflects how I am as a gay man, saying things about me as a gay man in my culture and something with which other people in the gay scene and who go to those clubs and bars and do the same activities can identify.”

Morrison is inspired by expressionist artists of the early 20th century like Max Beckmann and George Grosz in style and subject matter. As well their brightly coloured paintings, both artists frequented and depicted nightclubs and brothels. Morrison says, however, their art was more of a social comment while his own art, although it has some similarities is “more of a view as actually part of that world”.

“When those earlier painters made those social comments they were outside of the milieu. What I do is reflect what I am inside of the culture.

“It’s an inner vision, looking at the world around me. I incorporate my own personage in the environment.”

Pink Narcissist, an exhibition celebrating 20 years of Richard Morrison’s art is at Fad Gallery, 14 Corrs Lane, City, until January 31, 2012. fadgallery.com.au

Work from the exhibition will then be available to view at Jackman Gallery, 60 Inkerman Street, St Kilda.