Leon Morrocco: Long, Road Home, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh *****
A remarkable generation of Scottish artists came of age in the 1960s. Now in or near their 80s, it’s time to retire perhaps, except that artists generally don’t retire and a group of current shows suggests they just go on getting better. Leon Morrocco is celebrating his 80th birthday with an extensive show at the RSA. Duncan Shanks, who was born in 1937, has an equally extensive show of recent work at the Scottish Gallery, while Barbara Rae, who has a significant birthday next year, has a show on the same scale at the Open Eye. John McLean, too, belongs to this generation. He was 80 when he died three years ago, but the show of his work from the 70s and 80s is smaller and more retrospective in mood than the others. In a quite different time span, celebration of the 500th anniversary of Raphael’s death in 1520 was knocked back by the pandemic, but is now being marked by a digital show at Dovecot.
Of the four contemporaries,McLean was always a committed abstract painter. He took his cue initially from the Abstract Expressionists and the later generation of North American abstract painters, but developed a lyrical style that was quite his own. Landscape inspires the work of both Shanks and Rae, however. The drawing in Shanks’s sketchbooks at the Scottish Gallery is vivid and direct. Though not on view at the Open Eye, Rae’s sketchbooks are equally striking, recording with dramatic immediacy whatever she wants to put down for use in her painting. Nevertheless the way both these artists paint has clearly been influenced by the same post-war abstract painting that set McLean on his chosen course.
In contrast to these three, however, Leon Morrocco’s art is concrete. His drawing is beautiful, but does not go through a major metamorphosis as it informs his painting. He composes and reorganises what he has seen with great skill, building out of his observations subtle and complex compositions, often on a very large scale. Morrocco was taught initially by his father Alberto Morrocco, a gifted draughtsman and a pupil of James Cowie. Leon has inherited his father’s gift undimmed. His lucid and powerful drawings are a delight. Their discipline brings a sense of order to his painting that allows him to work successfully on a really grand scale. Community Garden, Melbourne, for instance, is five metres across. The picture’s subtitle, The Morning after the Night Before, reflects the human comedy that often enlivens his work. Morrocco’s travels are the matter of his art, ranging from Italy and Greece to India, North Africa and Australia where he lived from 1979 to 1992. The title of his show, Long Road Home, suggests maybe he has travelled enough, but his recent work is of the Alpes Maritime, the mountains behind Nice. The finale to his show is a group of four paintings, all on matching, nearly square canvasses and looking straight into these rocky mountains above green fields and the red roofs of the little towns that huddle at their feet.
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