Anne Morrison is one of the best painters of her generation. Using paint, gravity, and perception she creates her own eco-systems. These mini-worlds, writ large, reference landscape, the passage of time, and a quite particular sense of place, on the one hand, and human emotion, identity, and a wide-as-the-universe vision on the other. This vision is as inclusive of star systems and forming galaxies as it is of a found leaf on a beach, or the morphology of a particular plant. Yet none of this “background” would count for anything if she wasn’t such a damned good painter. How did she get where she is today, in absolute control of her subject matter, her technique, and her vision?

There were the early student years at Glasgow School of Art where she worked in the slip-stream of the neo-expressionist painters – Steven Campbell, Adrian Wiszniewski, Ken Currie and Peter Howson. Yet Anne’s work was always more in tune with her fellow painters such as Gwen Hardie, with whom she exhibited, or internationally with Brice Marden or Terry Winters.  There is an ambiguity about her work, which is one of the many things that draws you back to it, again and again. She is aware of this ambiguity and has said “The paintings often seem caught in an in-between state. Are they in the process of evolving or dissolving?”

She continued to follow her own path at the Royal College of Art in London where her contemporaries included some of the soon-to-emerge young British artists.  Anne’s work was always too personal and too honest to be hijacked by the hype of media-fashion as art, and in these recent works we can see a steady maturing like a fine Scottish malt. But not an airport duty free malt – something far more local, and interesting from Orkney, perhaps, or a lesser known part of Jura.

Jet travel has been important to Anne’s life as it has been to mine. In our early years in Tasmania we both – independently – travelled back to Scotland at least once a year. We would stop off at different Pacific islands on the way out and different Asian or African countries on the way back. All of this – like the residencies in Malaysia with Troy Ruffels – have added to the multi-layering of her work. And when we investigate these layers we see that ideas are folded against painterly techniques and they in turn form yet another strata, laid against raw human emotions.

Anne completed her trifecta of “great art schools of the world” by completing her PhD at Hobart’s Centre for the Arts where, in my opinion, she created some of her strongest and most focussed work. This is a legacy she builds on today as can be seen in these recent paintings.

Anne has the ability to soak up new cultures with the same curiosity she soaks up old scientific facts and develops new, painterly techniques. Anything can provide inspiration. She recently told me about some of those early inter-continental flights, “I remember waking up on an aeroplane at night, slightly disoriented, looking out the window uncertain as to where the sky or land began or ended, the city lights below seemed to blur into the stars above. I was reminded of Tim Winton’s novel Cloudstreet: two boys took a boat out at night and fell asleep, waking up to find the water so still that the night stars were reflected in the water beneath them so clearly and the stars are so bright that they thought they were floating in the sky surrounded above and below by stars.” She could equally well have been describing Richard Wilson’s great installation using sump oil that totally turns any architectural environment it is placed into, upside down. Yet somehow Anne’s description is more human while Wilson’s artwork is more clinical, more emotionally deslolate.

And this brings me to the warmth in Anne’s work. It is painted by a human who has feelings and emotions, who is passionate about art, and life, and family.

Long before I met Anne I bought a small painting of hers from the New 57 Gallery in Edinburgh. It is one of the jewels in my collection. Her mother had recently died and she had carried her, emotionally, through the last stages of her life as her mother had done for her in the early years of her own. All this was encoded within the paint surface of this tiny image, and it continues to pass through her on-going series of works like a strand of DNA, down the generations.