Blue in Green: Regan Morris's MOAT

March 5 to April 19, 1998 at University of Waterloo, Modern Languages Building Organized by the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge Alberta While I was browsing the 80 small polychrome paintings in Regan Morris's exhibition MOAT, I began reflecting on the recurrence of the colour green. The "green" in Morris's paintings is not one mixed with up-market cadmiums or ultramarine pigments. It is not the green that made a fashion appearance in the late Eighties in the form of the acid green T-shirt, nor the opaque and bluish "teal" currently popular in automotive finishes and pro-sports uniforms. Morris's green is at base a Sap Green, a vegetal pigment - cheap, unstable and prone to fading. At its greatest saturation, it approaches black. You find it commonly used in exterior enamels to paint the eaves' troughs and gables, windows and door frames, front porches and sometimes the surrounding yard fences of those familiar turn-of-the-century red and yellow brick houses found in eastern Canadian cities. It is only ever matched with white, sometimes forming an interior faux wainscotting on a plastered wall, up to chest height, above which would be white enamel. This was the beverage room aesthetic, the pool room, the diner - a hockey calendar on the wall, a Sweet Caporal poster, a top-loading Coke machine with ten-ounce bottles standing in cold water.  Sap Green and white were mixed as a durable wall colouring for the tiny foyers and narrow stairwells of duplexed houses. It turned up, almost without fail, in shared rooming-house kitchens. The more likely something might come in contact with a wall, the more likely it would be painted an enamel pastel green - washable, or at least, less likely to have to be washed. It darkened, took on a yellowy brown tinge from cigarette smoke, cooking grease and age. Often, wallpaper that had at one time carried a patterned dream of rococo elegance for a middle-class home, was later painted over with that functional pastel green by succeeding slumlords. As the mortar and lathing beneath the wallpaper began to crumble, cracks and stress marks would appear, making the walls seem like a decaying, putrefying and sagging skin.  My personal memories of this green begin with my family driving from the treeless avenues of war-time bungalows on Hamilton mountain, to the older communities of green trimmed, three-story red brick houses surrounding Gage Park, where narrow streets were shaded by maples and elms, and teemed with children and traffic. We had spaghetti at my aunt and uncle's flat on the second floor. My brother and I ate off a card table in the hall.  I must have encountered a hundred of those cheerless green foyers, stairwells and shared kitchens in search of a cheap place to land on my feet when I was going to school or leaving it, or breaking up or getting together. This pale enervated green was sometimes referred to as "puke green" as a measure of our increasingly sophisticated distaste, or less commonly "snot green," perhaps referring to the same bodily fluid that is also used to describe a "phlegmatic" or cold personality. "Snot green" cast an ugly functionality over my first homes away-from-home. We lived like guest workers, oppressed by the colour culture of our environment. We were the counter-culture in those days - green was the system - and we talked about how cool it would be to get rid of it - make the whole place white. We did, and the owners, taking advantage of our renovations, sold the properties at the first opportunity.  The thing about "this green" is that it is inherently unstable. It begins to fade noticeably as soon as it is applied. Shadows of the original colour are left in the areas not exposed to light, and the bleaching acts as a visual record of the passage of time. Regan Morris has established a reputation for creating wistful, elegiac images of decay through his distressed monochromatic surfaces. In MOAT, he found a vehicle for these qualities in familiar colours we know to age before our eyes. He employs dozens of shades of that stupid old green - probing memory, exciting rushes of recollection - rendering in a colour the experience of time lost.  Gordon Hatt, 1998