Kathleen Morris

Kathleen "Kay" Moir Morris (December 2, 1893 – December 20, 1986) was a Canadian painter and member of the Beaver Hall Group.

The fourth child and only daughter of Montague John Morris and Eliza Howard Bell, she was born in Montreal and was educated there, going on to study for ten years (1907-1917) at the Art Association of Montreal with William Brymner. She also spent two summers under Maurice Cullen at his outdoor sketching classes. Her father died in 1914, the same year she began to exhibit with the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts and the Art Association of Montreal. In the early 1920s she joined the Beaver Hall Group and in 1921 she began to show with the Ontario Society of Artists. In 1922 Morris went to live with her mother in Ottawa. Eliza Bell was a strong woman with feminist opinions, and encouraged her daughter's involvement in art. Support such as this was significant, as it was a struggle for women at the time to cross the conventional social boundary lines and succeed as an artist. Her mother's cousin, portrait painter Robert Harris (painter) also took an active interest in her career. The Beaver Hall Group officially dissolved in 1922, but she still participated in their exhibitions while living in Ottawa. She returned to the Montreal area in 1929 and lived there for the remainder of her life. Morris became a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts that same year. She took inspiration from the work of James Wilson Morrice while Morrice was also interested in her; he purchased one of her paintings from Watson Galleries in Montreal. Her work has been favourably compared to that of A.Y. Jackson and in 1930 she won Honourable mention at the Second Willingdon Arts Competition, placing second to F.H. Varley.
She painted scenes of urban and preindustrial rural Quebec not in support of a French Canadian identity but to suggest that the "primitive" could provide a sanctuary from modern life. From the first, deeply textured, strokes of her early works, to the gentle swoops of colour and line in her later landscapes, Morris exhibited a unique style that set her apart from her contemporaries. She painted from sketches, in which she simplified the forms and applied colour in bold, thick patches. Her subject matter reflected her kinship with her surroundings and an appreciation of the simple life. She also felt deeply for the animal world, voicing her concerns publicly to protest the annual seal hunt. Throughout her life, she spent two months of every summer in Marshall's Bay near Arnprior, Ontario, at a small secluded cottage that had been in the family for over a hundred years. There she would paint the fields and sunsets or indulge in her love for animals by painting cows and sheep. However, since exhibitors preferred her town rather than her country scenes, most of her time was spent developing her winter sketches into larger canvases. Her paintings can be compared to the work of Les Nabis, a group of mainly French painters active in the 1890s, whose works were influenced by Paul Gauguin’s expressive use of colour and rhythmic pattern. Like them, Morris translated her surroundings in an intuitive manner, guided by colour more than form, the latter at the service of the former. They resonate with courage, both personal and artistic, and place her in the same category as David Milne. They hover on that edge between reality and the unseen, allowing the eye to complete the image, allowing the one looking into the picture to see into the heart of the artist. Morris painted that way she was, unassuming and yet very present. In his assessment of the Beaver Hall Group exhibition at the 1937 Royal Institute Galleries in London, W.G. Constable singled out Morris as an outstanding example of the second generation of Impressionists. Although few of her paintings are dated and titles are often used more than once, her paintings are nostalgic reminders of a former time.

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