George Morant - An Australian Original
In 2015 after many years and many failed attempts to get George Morant to co-operate; Ocean Press came together with Dr Michael Richards to bring a quality book on Morant, his life and his work to print. The resulting book will be launched on January 29th 2016 at the Riddoch Regional Gallery. Only a limited number of artist signed copies will be available solely through this website.
The Outsider and His Indignant Eye.
The Art and Philosophy of a Passionate Iconoclast: GEORGE MORANT
Text by Michael Richards
George Morant is the quintessential rebel artist, whose work sharply satirizes Australian politics and history in the startling colors of the continent’s landscape.
Outsider Artists live on the margins of the art community, but they are not failed insiders or "wannabes". They are determined individualists, who paint with passionate intensity and honesty about the world they know, and they care nothing for the commercial art market and gallery system. Author Michael Richards explores Outsider Art through the work and philosophy of an extraordinary Australian painter, George Morant, a self-taught artist who began painting while mining opal at Lightning Ridge in outback New South Wales in the 1960s.
Since then Morant has created hundreds of typically big bold bravura compositions and held almost twenty solo exhibitions. Many of his most audacious and savagely satirical paintings are held in private and corporate collections around the world, and he is represented in the National Gallery of Australia (Canberra) with a highly controversial work on the theme of Aboriginal deaths in custody, “Queensland Sergeant.”
This book presents a brief outline of the life and work of this enigmatic and reclusive artist, along with reproductions of some of Morant’s most iconic and iconoclastic paintings, including works from his series such as “Crime and Corruption,” “Return of Christ,” “Courtship and Marriage” and “Murder Red Country”—the latter dealing with the colonization of Australia and theft of country from its indigenous inhabitants.
What they say about George Morant:
“George Morant is the pre-eminent painter of Australia’s unofficial social history.” -- Michel Sourgnes, former curator of Contemporary Art at the Queensland Art Gallery.
“Universal targets of Church and State have rarely been lampooned with such a boisterous sense of the absurd, or with such an exhilarating handling of colour. The bigger the canvas, as in Pity She’s a Whore, the more exuberant and fluent the style. … Interrogation by the Patriots with its crazily tilted planes, fauve colour, fleshy figure crowned with thorns and jack-booted soldiers, recalls the scalpel-sharp satire of George Grosz or Max Beckmann.” —Nancy Borlase, Sydney Morning Herald
80 pages, including 41 color plates, CLOTH, ISBN 978-0-9872283-9-0
Price AUD$50 including Postage within Australia