Artist's Statement
Defining art as a way to describe the beauty and terror of existence, figure paintings can bare an aspiration toward the eternal, paired with the fragile and ephemeral. “Every moment is of endless worth, for it represents the whole of eternity.” Heather Morgan’s figurative oil paintings, primarily of women, dwell in themes of performance of identity and gender as a reflective way to express life’s perverse tension between frail and fleeting, and the infinite. “An artist…neglects no aspect of his dual nature. This dualism is the power of being oneself and someone else at the same time.” Morgan’s women are consumed by the viewer, the voyeur’s gaze. They often display a self-possession that suggests the knowledge that they are being examined, either from the mirror, seeing themselves as though from the outside, or by the viewer.

The possibilities for self-creation are illustrated in a succession of vivid characters loosely based on the artist, her acquaintance, and recognizable cultural constructions; cigar-chomping chicks, androgynes, harlots, fighters, dancing queens, the starved, the tragically hip, the desperate (but not serious). Whether lurid or delicate, these figures are rendered with intelligence and awareness. The originality of these images comes from a sensibility that echoes the step of our time through fashion, expression, and a keen visual wit.

These works invite the viewer to look and to covet, presenting an alluring world that is also potent and seething. Beauty quivers with pain and flaw in the distorted, luminous, candy-like figures that populate Morgan’s paintings. Every detail suggests a struggle, every gesture conveys a meaning, loaded with self-questioning. The figures stretch out louche before the viewer and bravely offer themselves with a conflicting, penetrating gaze. These unflinching yet vulnerable pastel heroines become all the more unknowable, as they reveal themselves in their fractured splendor.