written by Christopher Guly

Having spent endless hours of his childhood watching Saturday-morning cartoons and reading comic books, Ottawa-born visual artist Andrew Morrow was well primed to become an X-Men aficionado during his high-school years.

This early steeping in comic-book culture has undeniably influenced his work, described thus far as “chaotic.” His epic, large-scale depictions of mass conflict draw from “varied ages and genres, assembling images reflecting the potential for, or actualization of, beautiful violence and power,” according to Toronto’s Edward Day Gallery, which sells Morrow's pieces.

That body of work, according to Morrow, largely reflects an unconscious manifestation of the pop-culture phase of a 12-year-old boy with a “modernist quest for the magnum opus” – a realization he’s made as a graduate student in the inaugural two-year Master of Fine Arts program in the Department of Visual Arts.

Intrigued by his own revelation, Morrow is using his time in the program to better understand the “impulses” behind his paintings and to either augment or alter the direction of the process. “The coursework has helped me discover that my work has been somewhat narrow,” he explains. “My historical style of painting was confining and, secondly, the uneasy relationship that I have with images of violence and war weren’t being depicted.”

Morrow appreciates that the graduate program provides him with more regular feedback than he’d normally receive from the occasional art critic reviewing one of his shows. Being in Ottawa affords him opportunities to hear not only from professors in the department, but also from visiting curators at renowned institutions like the National Gallery of Canada, not to mention the robust artistic communities themselves in Ottawa and Montreal. Their reviews challenge him to question every assumption he has about his work.

“That constant critique is introducing me to different ideas, books and artists that help enrich my work and perhaps take it in a different direction,” he says.

“Andrew has made a great leap creatively,” says Penny Cousineau-Levine, chair of the Visual Arts Department and of the Graduate Studies Committee. “He was already starting from a place of great accomplishment. But he’s opening his work up to discovering new directions and has given himself time to be part of an environment saturated with high-level artistic theory and critical feedback.”

As part of the visual requirement for his master’s thesis, Andrew will stage an exhibit at the City Hall Gallery in the summer of 2009. The show will consist of one massive battle scene, spanning 2.4 metres by 4.8 metres and accompanied by several smaller paintings.

The show’s centrepiece will reflect his newly gained insight and his earlier 2003-2004 oil-on-canvas-work, Large War Painting, which depicts a fictional battle among anachronistic beings such as tyrannosaurs, samurai and flamingos, all at war in what he has described as an “endless and futile orgy of violence.” Already evident in the roughly 2-metre by 2-metre Large War Painting was Morrow’s burgeoning evolution in visual language from X-Men to European masterpieces.

Now, his artistic journey has taken him to sociological theory to investigate the shaping of masculine identity in culture and how it has influenced the energy and excitement he channels onto canvas.

“The graduate program has given me different tools to support my artistic process and step outside my work in order to keep it moving forward in the future,” says Morrow. “It’s taught me the benefits of experimenting, never getting comfortable and regularly questioning my work.”