Artist Statement

After trying to perfect my skills as a draughtsman for 15-plus years, I realized two things. One, I was as good as I was going to get and two, there seemed to be an invisible price barrier regarding the drawings. It's historic.

In the Middle Ages, painters used drawings to lay down ideas cheaply and quickly in order to get a feel of how the finshed work would appear on a much large scale using paint....a cathedral ceiling for example. Later, drawings were used as preparatory studies that were not seen as finished artworks on their own. That was the painting. Never the study. This did not make the drawing second rate, but one thing was blatantly evident: there was little or no colour in the drawing. In my case, it seemed that a drawing was considered worthy of purchase but a large price would mean a very large drawing. So for me the writing was on the wall. I couldn't get any better, I needed colour in my work, and I needed to move from paper to canvas, work bigger, and use paint instead of the sharpened tip of a pencil. This would let me ascend through the "it's only a drawing" price barrier. And it did.

Although I abandoned the hyper-realist drawings on paper, I did take one very important element of that period with me to the non-figurative period. The use of shadow. The shadow is meant to give a credible three-dimensionality to the otherwise abstract forms. Makes them whimsical from a distance and adds just a little intrigue. A false thing pretending to be a real thing. And I'm going to let you discover that.

- Cole Morgan 2014

Cole Morgan - Artist Statement

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