Alan Morgan
About the Artist
I have always had an interest in painting and drawing but no formal training and not enough time to follow it up due to work and family commitments. At school I was forced to choose between art or science and chose the latter. When I retired after 36 years as an organic radiochemist (synthesising radioactive compounds for drug research) I now had time to pursue my belated career in art . I started to paint in acrylics and alkyd oils and became a member of various art groups in South Wales and the South West.
I am a member of the Belle Vue Art Group in Newport and when I moved from Cardiff to Bath in 2011 joined the Combe Down Art Group , which I left in 2017 to relocate to Royal Wootton Bassett where I joined the RWBAD . In 2019 I was accepted as a member of the Guild of Wiltshire Artists.
As well as exhibiting and selling my paintings in local exhibitions and cafes I was accepted to exhibit at the prestigious Bath Society of Artists Summer Exhibitions at the Victoria Gallery, Bath in 2014 and 2015, selling my cubist style 'Pulteney Bridge' in the latter exhibition.
I started out painting in a conventional, figurative way (landscapes, detailed close-ups of steam engines, quirky still lives etc). However, in the last few years I have developed an interest in Modern Painting, particularly Cubism. For me the appeal of Cubism, besides the sheer beauty of its intricate design, is the way it looks at the world in a completely new way, disregarding the conventional theories of art that had gone before. Although I admire the Cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque I have taken the later 'Salon Cubists' such as Metzinger, Gliezes and Delaunay as my inspiration, mainly because of their use of colour and less obscure imagery. They realised that, in order to gain recognition, they had to make Cubism more accessible to the public. I enjoy experimenting and developing a style influenced by these masters.