We get rare, exciting glimpses of it in the work of Keith Morrison at Bomani Gallery. Morrison, who is dean of the College of Creative Arts at San Francisco State University, was born in Jamaica in 1942 but has lived in the United States for many years and has traveled extensively. His paintings are improvised images that reel between memory and fantasy, travelogue and rebus, borrowed and private symbols.
References abound to the landscape and culture of the Caribbean, Africa and urban America.
Many painters attempt the sort of free association Morrison practices, but of all modes of pictorial expression it may be the most difficult to sustain. To my eye, Morrison's touch with paint is almost too relaxed, but if that looseness is the price of the freedom he feels to deploy color, then to fault him for it would be caviling. His touch proves itself, though, in his manipulation of space. As in a dream, the objects and settings in his pictures seem to change dimensions with the intensity of your attention to them. Only when you switch focus to those lavender-mottled curves do they show themselves to be the silhouette of a bass resting sideways atop the grand piano that forms the composition's ground plane.