Josie Morway
Born 1975, Falmouth, MA, lives and works in Providence, RI
Wind Up Like a Clock: Tell Me It’s Just About Time, 2006, oil on wood, 48” x 48”, Collection of Jennifer and Charles Rose
Josie Morway is a representational painter whose most recent works deal with images of birds. To create these paintings, the artist finds photographs of birds in ornithological reference books and then substantially alters and re-contextualizes them. The most significant changes involve scale and background. Morway makes her birds majestic and monumental by radically enlarging their size and closely cropping the image so that the animals take up the bulk of each painting’s surface. Also, the birds no longer appear in their natural habitat, or against the neutral backdrop of a scientific text, but in entirely new, ambiguous, and shallow spaces that seem urban, interior, or designed. In this way, the artist concentrates on the gestures and personalities of the birds, as well as their beautiful colors and textures, in a colossal and confrontational format. Thus, what began as an objective representation of a species is transformed into a subjective expression of the emotional power of an individual animal. It is also important to note that Morway’s long and puzzling titles are entirely personal, and are in no way intended as guideposts to the interpretation of the paintings.
