Current Work of Phil Morsman

Phil Morsman: Artists two short statements

For me painting is an act of meditation. Whether the image arrives spontaneously or as the result of a long struggle – it is about creating an object that has its own life in the world and can become a subject of meditation for others.

I have no wish to explain my paintings. They are about feeling rather than meaning. I work on them over a prolonged period until they have achieved a coherent physical presence and perhaps a kind of dynamic serenity.

Phil Morsman has been described as a ‘poetic colourist’ and his work as ‘vibrantly sensuous’. He studied art in London ( Epsom & Wimbledon ) and Sheffield during the 1960’s and after a few seminomadic years settled in Cumbria, where he lives and works in a converted medieval church. Over the past two decades his paintings have been shown widely throughout the UK, with regular solo shows in Cambridge, St Ives and the north of England. He is represented in numerous public, corporate and private collections and has received several large-scale prestigious commissions. These include a sequence of six 9m high wall-hanging banners for the new Cumberland Infirmary in Carlisle; a 100 sq m decorative wall scheme for the new Bedson Teaching Centre at Newcastle University; a group of 45 gouaches for a conference centre at Amman in Jordan and a pair of large paperworks for the London HQ of the ill-fated Enron. In 2003 he created an 8.5 m wall sculpture in fibre-glass and neon for Lancaster Royal Infirmary and in 2004 a series of paintings and screenprints for Durham City Council based on the meander of the River Wear around the city. His images have also been used as the cover-art for several CDs and poetry collections.