‘The image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.’ This description by the American poet, Ezra Pound, precisely articulates Jennifer Morrison’s vision. For her a painting is never merely notional. Indeed, Morrison’s suspicion of the manifest content of a painting – what it means – is critical. She has ‘no great interest in content, in narrative,’ which, regarding South African art, she decries for being too prescriptive – ‘about this-this-this’, ‘a substitute for looking.’ While provocative, Morrison’s view is trenchant, and tallies well with that of Pound. If an image is ‘more than an Idea,’ it is because something suprasensible and pre-cognitive comes into play. Moreover, no poem or painting is reducible to a single notion. Rather, expression supposes ‘a vortex or cluster of fused ideas’, an entangled, vertiginous intensity. After all, a vortex supposes an abyssal spiraling ‘energy,’ a forcefield that cannot be contained or mastered, which, nevertheless, proves a driving force in the making of an artwork.
‘Even a vortex is a vortex in something. You can’t have a whirlpool without water; and you can’t have a vortex without gas, or molecules or atoms or ions or electrons or something, not nothing.’ George Bernard Shaw’s view is yet another illumination of Morrison’s vision. For it is an elementality that is all pervasive, which informs the artist’s energy field. Her paintings are electrified, galvanic, super-charged, even animistic and primal in their expression. If there is never ‘nothing’, it remains difficult to ascertain a given ‘something’ as operative in their making and articulation. Certainly, one is moved by a given painting’s turbulence, its concussive wrenching together of the external and internal, macroscopic and microscopic. One is privy to a universe as vast as it is minuscule. In all the paintings, this is evidenced in their viscosity, gnash, grind and flow. It is as though one were caught in a tempest – picture William Turner lashed to a mast in a storm. That said, it is not only the epic quality or high drama of the paintings that counts, but their narrowing grasp of flux – some microbial dance.
How organic are Morrison’s paintings? How metaphysical? How material? Each of these dimensions are at play in the vortex she creates. We see split and non-parallel worlds, simultaneity yet radical distances between spaces. While coagulated, jammed, interpenetrative, there is also a meticulous grasp of the separability of elements. It is here, in the paintings’ gnashing midst, that we see the artist’s acute capacity to parse the world, find subtle distinctions within a tumultuous maw.
Louisa May Alcott, the celebrated author of Little Women, describes the act of writing which also captures Morrison’s relationship to painting. ‘Every few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, and fall into a vortex.’ This vision of a ‘scribbling suit’ is vivid. One can perhaps see the painter at work, not before a page but before a sprawling canvas. Hers is a gestural art – an art of flows, loops, drags, floods. While far more congested and vivacious, one cannot ignore the influence of Cy Twombly, or Paul Klee who famously spoke of ‘taking a line for a walk.’ But, in a more contained form, there is also the artist’s a love of the wild, of Expressionism, both German and American.
More loosely, Morrison’s art is devoted to abstraction, a creative impulse that is never about nothing, though this is typically and mistakenly believed to be the case. Here, Jerry Saltz’s summation is especially apt. ‘Abstraction may speak in a sort of intra-species visual-electronic-chemical-phenomenal code, creating optical-cerebral networks and wormholes, organic maps of unknown yet familiar territories, may have a kind of plant intelligence that allows it to grow, proliferate, flower, change directions, and survive relentless aesthetic predation from a lay public.’ In other words, abstraction – in this case Jennifer Morrison’s expression thereof – refuses containment and explication. Rather, one finds oneself in the midst of an eruption or fission flare, in larval or combustible terrains, attenuated emotional landscapes, thrusts, plunges, ecstatic soarings.
One might, in the moment of encounter, recall Buffalo Springfield’s lyric – ‘There’s something happening here / what it is ain’t exactly clear.’ And yet, despite not being able to explain Morrison’s art – or to explain it away – one senses its potent frisson. For these are galvanic works, electrical pulsations, that race through our bodies. Perhaps, imagine oneself slipping into a Jennifer Morrison painting in the way that the artist might slip into her ‘scribbling suit.’
