Malcolm Morley: Painting, Paper, Process

About The Publication

Alicia G. Longwell

First published in 2012 by the Parrish Art Museum

64 pages, $14.95

Malcolm Morley: Painting, Paper, Process brings together works that have rarely been seen together and includes such diverse images as idyllic beach scenes; the artist’s beloved black and white border collie, Elsa, in play and repose; and knights in armor, WWII flying aces, and their present day inheritors, the sports stars who carry on the legacy of derring do. “I decided that this was contemporary mythology, and the sports stars were the heroes,” Morley says. “To be a hero, you have to take a risk, so of course the best ones are those that risk their lives—NASCAR drivers and people like that.” Ring of Fire (2009), the life-size, freestanding sculpture of a Motocross rider, is composed of heavyweight watercolor paper on an armature of plastic plumbing pipe. The “mud” on the piece is a mixture of paint and papier mâché flung with a toilet brush. “You can do a lot of things with paper,” Morley has said, “and I always think of sculpture as something in two dimensions that’s folded.”