Construction in Fantasy

Construction in Fantasy dates from Morrison’s Fulbright Fellowship in France, where he studied at Paris’s Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the University of Aix-Marseilles. The work is a strong representation of Morrison’s transition from a regional landscape artist to an abstract expressionist. In Paris and in the coastal city of Antibes, Morrison worked specifically in gouache and ink on paper while studying scenes of daily life. Construction in Fantasy depicts the local seaport and maritime culture of Antibes, where the artist visually documented his long-term fascination with large bodies of water—a subject he focused on throughout his career while living in New York City, Provincetown, Massachusetts, and in Minnesota. Morrison’s abstract approaches—specifically automatism—propelled his unique visual language that synthesized the abstract expressionist subconscious with Ojibwe aesthetic sensibilities and the artist’s ties to his ancestral homelands in northern Minnesota.