Artist research: Freya Douglas-Morris

Updated on 17 March 2017 (Harvard referencing).

17 October 2016. I am not sure where to put the work of Freya Douglas-Morris (*1980, UK). Most of the paintings I found I have to admit seem arbitrarily rudimentary to me and the interpretations offered on her Saatchi page (Saatchi Gallery, n.d.) are difficult to extract from what I think I see. In an interview in “Elephant. The Art Culture Magazine” (Steer, n.d.) she explains the role her memory plays in her work as it “edits, adapts, heightens and loses visual information.” Maybe this explains, why her symbolic language appears so different to mine. My visual memory is near “photographic” and I have access to very detailed information from the images I retrieve from the past and then concoct new images internally from what is stored there. This characteristic of my brain can be quite useful at times, offering for example the option of never getting lost in foreign cities, but as I am becoming aware now as I write this, may be exactly the reason why I struggle with the developing process of paintings. It feels as if my memory braced itself against the willed changing of information. One of Douglas-Morris’s uncanny oil paintings, “All the Light” (Douglas-Morris, 2015), though, has a great appeal to me. It reminds me in style of the Austrian surrealist Arik Brauer. I quite like the ghostlike treetrunks and the ambiguous welcoming-rejecting mood of the forest as a whole.

While her overall access to painting feels diametrically opposite to my own I am glad to have come across Frey Douglas-Morris. In comparing internal mechanisms of reappraisal I have found some valuable hints regarding the limits posed by mental processes and therefore a chance to work at overcoming their restrictive power.
Off to a Tibetan monastery.

References:

Douglas-Morris, F. (2015) All The Light [oil on canvas] [online]. Lychee One Gallery, London. Available at: http://lycheeone.com/wp/Freya/ [Accessed 17 March 2017]

Saatchi Gallery (n.d.) Freya Douglas-Morris [online]. Saatchi Gallery, London. Available at: http://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/freya_douglas_morris.htm?section_name=paper [Accessed 17 October 2016]

Steer, E. (n.d.) 5 Questions With Freya Douglas-Morris [interview] [online]. Elephant, The Art Culture Magazine, London. Available at: https://elephantmag.com/5-questions-freya-douglas-morris/ [Accessed 17 October 2016]

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