Composition

A member of the Anishinaabe people of the Grand Portage Reservation, George Morrison was active in the New York School of Abstract Expressionism, a mid-20th-century movement of avant-garde artists who saw abstraction as the essential vehicle for conveying intense emotion and exploring the unconscious through color, form, space, and gesture. Though his work is largely non-representational, Morrison relied on observations and memories of nature for inspiration and subject matter. The present drawing is likely based on his impressions of commercial fishing nets left out to dry. At the time he made this drawing, Morrison was living in New York City, but regularly spent his summers in Cape Ann, Massachusetts, a region known for its fishing industry where he would have likely seen arrays of fishing nets. Though derived from observation, the subject of Morrison’s monochromatic drawing is the abstract interplay of line, form, space, and light mediated by his subjective interpretation.