London is currently home to two exhibitions of art by British painter Cedric Morris. The first, at the Garden Museum, concentrates on his dual identity as an artist and an award-winning gardener. Floral still lifes and the English countryside don’t exactly set the world on fire as the subject of an art exhibition. But ‘Cedric Morris: Artist Plantsman’ turns this tranquil topic on its head, showing how the British artist painted the humble bouquet as an unruly, wild, wonky thing.
The Garden Museum’s small, one-room exhibition space is painted aubergine to mimic the bruise-like colours Morris liked to use. They’ve packed a lot in, mainly his flower paintings but also a few landscapes – including one of the art school a young Lucian Freud is rumoured to have accidentally burned down – and one of the succulents Morris knew were cool way before hipster coffee shops got in on the action.
The flowers in these paintings are a mishmash of the type found in the average suburban backyard (alliums, foxgloves and buddleia), plus some fancier varieties like Himalayan blue poppies that, as Monty Don will tell you, are notoriously hard to grow.
But you don’t need to be a gardening geek to appreciate these paintings. Morris avoided being cutesy or trad by never painting neat arrangements. Opium poppies, arum lilies and passion flowers spill over the edges of vases, tumbling out willy-nilly. He even makes them look a bit sexy – not full-on Georgia O’Keeffe sexy, but still, these are not your grandmother’s flower arrangements.
This other Morris show, at Philip Mould & Co, follows the artist off the beaten track and around the world on his frequent travels, linking him with the landscapes he roamed. So in this exhibition you get whitewashed Cornish cottages, Portuguese beaches, ancient ruins in Turkey, hillside Italian chapels (that one in a painting previously owned by David Bowie) and so on.
It’s a more varied collection than the Garden Museum’s plants, plants and more plants exhibition. There are some real gems here, including two early watercolours of hazy, sunset-pink landscapes clearly inspired by the impressionists.
Like with his paintings of flowers, there’s nothing chocolate-boxy about these landscapes. Luckily, he has a habit of making everything look a teensy bit moody, like the faintest threat of rain is always there.