Eye of the Storm

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BBC Scotland - Eye of the Storm

One of Scotland’s finest landscape artists, eyesight failing, attempts one last painting.

Renowned landscape painter James Morrison struggles with the loss of his sight in a poignant account of a creative mind dealing with the physical frailties that catch up with all.

Renowned landscape painter James Morrison faces his greatest challenge. His eyesight is fading fast, and he has one more painting to complete. From his studio just outside Montrose, Morrison can hear the crashing North Sea. On the wall is a drawing of Mickey Mouse that he completed when he was eight years old, at the outset of World War II.

‘My sight has deteriorated quite badly,’ Morrison admits. ‘And the very thought of coming in here and not being able to pick up a brush and do something with it really terrifies me.’ Nevertheless he has agreed to let film-maker Anthony Baxter follow him as he picks up the brushes again at the age of 85 after being sidelined by a series of operations. And while doing so, he reflects on an extraordinary artistic life.

Eye of the Storm is a fascinating exploration of what it means to be a landscape painter. It is also the poignant and universal story of a creative mind dealing with his own mortality, and the physical frailties that catch up with all of us. The film movingly intertwines Morrison’s struggle with old age, with his lively views as a much younger painter, captured in remarkable archive filmed more than 50 years ago. Pivotal moments in Morrison’s career are also brought vividly to life by Scottish animator Catriona Black. Indeed, her own journey to understand Morrison’s artistic genius, in order to do justice to it in the film, represents a story within a story in this multi-layered and visually stunning documentary.

As Morrison begins painting again, he is particularly troubled by the fact that – on doctor’s orders – he can’t paint outside. His lifelong compulsion to paint what he sees, en plein air, has taken him around the world – from Africa to Paris to Greenland.

Morrison explains that it all started in Glasgow. Son of a shipyard pipefitter, Morrison entered the famous Glasgow School of Art in 1950. While other students embraced the overtly political and abstract art then fashionable, Morrison was attracted to the landscape painters of a different era such as Claude Lorrain, Jean-François Millet and Scotland’s own Horatio McCulloch.

Morrison’s first major subjects were the crumbling Glasgow tenements, home to thousands of working-class families soon to be relocated to the outskirts of the city. Though painted without people, Morrison’s haunting paintings are memorials to a lost way of life, and would find their place in major museums. And his concern with documenting fleeting, disappearing worlds would become a recurring feature of his work.

Morrison’s work then underwent a dramatic shift when he moved to the tiny fishing village Catterline in north east Scotland in 1959. Here, Morrison effectively established what would become a famed artists’ colony, along with painter Joan Eardley. As he views archive from the time, which he has not seen in half a century, Morrison relives his artistic and personal friendship with the woman who some consider the greatest Scottish artist of the 20th century. While Eardley became beloved for her portraits of children, Morrison never painted the human figure. Instead, he focused on the skies and landscape of Angus and the Mearns that would become a distinctive feature of his work. Morrison’s quest for meaning in the landscape took him, ultimately, to the least populated part of the planet – the high arctic reaches of Canada and Greenland.

‘I had no idea what I was getting into,’ Morrison says wryly, settling into an extraordinary tale, which includes hair-raising flights over glaciers and arctic bison, and a confrontation with a polar bear, all the result of his determination to paint the vanishing arctic wilderness.

As Morrison returns to his studio to paint, there is a sense of time running out. His memory is now failing as well, and he needs to refer to a piece of paper in his pocket to remember the director’s name. 

A new solo exhibition of his work in Edinburgh – his twenty-fifth – is soon to be mounted at The Scottish Gallery. Despite his worsening sight, Morrison has promised the organisers one last work.

As he shuffles through half a dozen different pairs of glasses, he expresses his frustration at not being able to focus his eyes on the canvas properly. But as he begins painting on a pristine white board, he miraculously summons up the energy of the brash young painter he once was, his brush flashing across the canvas, leaving behind great waves of lapis lazuli.

As the film – and Morrison’s own artistic journey – draws to a close, there is a final moment of poignant triumph in Edinburgh. The first case of Covid in the UK is still a few weeks away. As the artist arrives at what will be his last solo exhibition, his wheelchair guided by his daughter Judith, as he greets his great grandson and a host of admirers, Morrison learns that one of his final paintings – Dark Landscape – has already sold. James Morrison would die, a few months later, at the age of 88.

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