Freya Douglas-Morris

We are delighted to launch our Online Viewing Room with a focus on the work of Freya Douglas-Morris whose lyrical work is like being transported into a reverie, a mythical place of utter tranquillity.  Her use of glowing colours and figures in landscape echo the mood found in the works of Gauguin or Matisse, whose pivotal 1904 painting Luxe, Calme et Volupte was taken from Charles Baudelaire’s poem, Invitation to a Voyage, in which a man invites his love to travel with him to paradise. Douglas-Morris’s wistful, symbolic titles sometimes come from her own poems, lending a sense in which these scenes are also inner landscapes – place as metaphor for states of mind, memories and psychological journeys magically distilled into paint.   

Freya Douglas-Morris fluid, intuitive works convey a sense of time passing, the rhythms of nature, times of the day and seasons rendered in lush landscapes, dense forests, rolling hills, sparkling rivers, far horizons, sunsets, starry skies and the sea shores. The atmosphere of the paintings are built up through the tone of the landscape and some aspects of the painted surface are laid out in thin washes of paint whilst other areas are more worked with the paint rich and more textured.  Douglas-Morris plays a part in every aspect of making the work from stretching the canvas to priming the surface and this process gives her a feel for the materiality of the work and ideas for the atmosphere of the painting she might make. Sometimes the hues are almost akin to vegetable-dye in feel, natural and earthy; at other times she employs punchy, vivid colours. This play on colour keeps the landscape shifting - part real, part memory and part poetic license. The integration of various types of plants, trees, the appearance of the sun or moon, waves, paths, boats; all create a sense of narrative out of the surroundings, as if the paintings are pages of a story, each one linking to the next.  Sometimes the landscapes are unoccupied. At other times there are figures, such as the large work Family depicting a man, woman and child in bathing suits, like a holiday snapshot tinged with nostalgia.

Douglas-Morris themes of  love, relationships, a couple walking, a mother sitting with her baby, a lone figure reflecting are partly a reflection on her own life but are also universal.  Morris likes to look at the simple moments, the quiet spaces, capturing her figures unaware, in a state of repose or contemplation.  Though the scenes echo reality their description is often imagined, with a heightened sense of place and atmosphere, a liminal place in which the boundaries of the real and the dreamt are dissolved.