Love. Courtesy of Andrew Morrow.

Andrew Morrow is a veteran of grand gestures. These haven’t always worked out well, but even when they have, the result is often a lingering disillusionment. It’s like sacrificing heavily for something only to realize you never really wanted it: a weird mix of Aesop’s sour grapes and sweet lemons, and one of humanity’s Achilles’ heels. Success makes him feel a bit fraudulent, although less so today when he can sell most paintings he produces. Yet he’s never been content enough to believe what he’s doing truly translates his entire creativity. And it makes him ache for continual transformation.

“There’s this trap of seeing (my work) critically. I’m still seduced by the sale, and bored by it. I guess I see an emptiness in it, and I’m always trying to make art more true.” He’s felt this way before, with a girl in high school, with a career in animation, and early in the University of Ottawa’s first Master’s of Fine Arts program. It doesn’t bother Morrow that much; he considers these stumbles simply as arrows pointing at what he’s supposed to do next. Which is why he’s trying to move away from canvas, away from its limitations on what he really wants to say, although he’s not sure what that vocabulary is yet.

When he recently became a collector’s darling, he knew exactly what to say: “In my work, images are pulled from their original context and shifted into a critical and deconstructive take on contemporary masculinity and painting. This is what Neo Rauch calls the peristaltic process, the method whereby an artist absorbs his/her external environment, which is then processed and excreted, transformed and shifted through a subjective process” –  pulled from an interview with Scott Waters in the Cold issue of Drain magazine.

An evolving definition of spectacular

Morrow was finishing up his Masters. He sees the puffiness of his words as another grand gesture. “When I’m confident about something, I’m aware of what’s good and not good art. I don’t think I’d talk like that now.” If anything he prefers his metaphors a little more guttural, a return to that “dirty, stupid art” that has always provided inspiration, an excess he’s never been able to, nor want to, completely exfoliate.

His courses at the University of Ottawa courses changed him by creating a focus on how his work was being received. He now recognizes that his childhood artistic impulses couldn’t stand up to academic scrutiny. “The (naively) spectacular nature of my work was challenged completely, questioned from every angle. It was painful, but I loved it.” At school his work got grander, even a little violent; his titles were raw, shocking. “I just wanted to see how these things collide with all the other things in life.” It represented another skin shed.

An interview after a recent show at Ottawa’s City Hall could be paraphrased as “I like to stir things up. Isn’t real art supposed to change people’s views of things?” This has been a consistent theme for Morrow since childhood. But so has the boredom that seems to creep into each stage of his creative life.

“I grew up in the 80s: the age of spectacle – Sly Stallone, Transformers – which of course was never the truth, but spectacle is hard-wired in me. My father was a patent lawyer, my mom taught ESL (English as a Second Language). She thinks in terms of grand gestures, and I sense she had high expectations for me.” Although Morrow’s grandmother was a symphonic violinist, he was never raised to be an artist in Ottawa’s Beacon Hill. He was the kid who could draw, especially comics. He wasn’t popular even though he was the lead singer (also playing keyboards) in a high-school band. It is the kind of life that could spin one way or another, even in or out of control depending on circumstances.

There was, however, a romantic strain that kept him strangely and precariously balanced. Morrow has always been physically attractive and admits to many liaisons. Yet throughout high school he dated the same girl, a Mormon with rigid rules about life. “It was very much Romeo and Juliet. One night I’d be straight with her, the next drunk with my friends. Maybe that led to the porn (a criticism of some of his work) later, although I think that’s a bit of a myth. There was something very balanced about that (time). I still buy into myths, about love and understanding, even if they’re a bit of a fiction.”

He dispensed with a piece of fiction early in his undergrad biochemistry studies at Queen’s University. “Fruit flies drove me crazy; I just didn’t give a shit.” So he took six months off to flip burgers before returning to the school’s fine arts program. “I fell in love with what was going on in the arts building. It was alien to my understanding, a big unknown world that I wanted to explore.”

Unfulfilling does not mean boring

Playing academic catch-up with other students and feeling slightly fraudulent only added to the buzz, convincing him that an earlier love of comic spectacle might actually be turned into a career. Morrow then took two years’ of animation at Vancouver’s Capilano College and got a job at a studio in Toronto, where he lasted another two years before deciding the work was “ethically problematic.” Mostly it was another case of creeping disillusion: “I was making ads for toys:  useless, empty. It was like making beautiful bullets for guns. I wasn’t really any good at animation.” So he went back to painting.

He did what he knew would sell. He’d walk into a bar, usually one with an interesting interior, and take a picture which he would reproduce in oils: lots of wood, lots of mood, no people. His skill again made his work highly sellable, but after two years, it too became unfulfilling. “That’s not the same as boring,” Morrow points out. “Whatever I do, I try to use its intrinsic power and then move on.” Painting bar interiors was part of the apprenticeship, even though he’s still trying to figure out what the lesson was,  other than the pleasure of change. A life of constant transformation makes him wonder why some artists can paint flowers for 60 years and be content.

The bar years

In 2003 Morrow married his long-time sweetheart Sheila, found a house in Chelsea and started making babies. He says he loves the stability and routine. Maybe it’s changed him more than he realizes; for the first time, he’s seeing the canvas as a limited medium. “You try to squeeze too much into it, and It can only handle so much of what you want to say. I’m not saying it’s boring; it’s just frustrating when you’re trying to create a new context for yourself.” The feeling is familiar, and he knows it’s time for another shift.

Radical change will have to wait at least two months until after a solo show in Toronto. Yet even in Canada’s biggest market, Morrow will try a new direction, using multiple rooms to create an impression of mediated spectacle. He says the experiment should make him wiser and help with a pet project he’s determined to start in Ottawa. The idea is an audience-inclusive, multi-disciplinary presentation series or, more simply, an evening every two months where artists and art consumers try to understand each other. Morrow is convinced Ottawa is starting to take art seriously, and not necessarily in a commercial sense.  He wants to work with exciting people and venues – like Patrick Mikhail (at Patrick Mikhail Gallery) –  because of the energy he smells in them. And chasing energy has always been his way of dealing with disillusionment.

He’ll never give up painting, and it’s unlikely he’ll move far away from spectacle, masculine identity and the “dirty, stupid art” that is the closest he’s ever seemed to come to truth. He wants his work to engage people, to compete with all the other things out there that require focussed attention, like movies. Morrow wants artistic attention, not necessarily for himself but for a culture around him that unfortunately is becoming increasingly satisfied with gestures that are no longer grand.