Kathleen Morris

Kathleen "Kay" Moir Morris (December 2, 1893 – December 20, 1986) was a Canadian painter and although not an official member of the Beaver Hall Group, she often is counted as a member since she was friendly with many of its members and exhibited with them.

Biography The fourth child and only daughter of Montague John Morris and Eliza Howard Bell, she was born in Montreal, Quebec and was educated there, going on to study for ten years (1907–1917) at the Art Association of Montreal with William Brymner. She also spent two summers under Maurice Cullen at his outdoor sketching classes. Her father died in 1914, the same year she began to exhibit with the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts and the Art Association of Montreal. In the early 1920s, she was associated with the Beaver Hall Group and in 1921 she began to show with the Ontario Society of Artists.

In 1922, Morris went to live with her mother in Ottawa, Ontario. Eliza Bell was a strong woman with feminist opinions, and encouraged her daughter's involvement in art. Support such as this was significant, as it was a struggle for women at the time to cross the conventional social boundary lines and succeed as an artist. Her mother's cousin, portrait painter Robert Harris also took an active interest in her career. The Beaver Hall Group officially dissolved in 1922, but she participated in their exhibitions while living in Ottawa. She also showed her work abroad. She returned to the Montreal area in 1929 and lived there for the remainder of her life. She took inspiration from the work of James Wilson Morrice Her work has been favourably compared to that of A. Y. Jackson and in 1930 she won Honourable mention at the Second Willingdon Arts Competition, placing second to Frederick Varley.

Style and work

Morris painted scenes of urban and pre-industrial rural Quebec (Morris: "Quebec is the most perfect place to paint.) A.Y. Jackson my great friend used to say to me, 'You're so lucky. Everywhere you look there's a painting— a church, a house. I have to go so far to find my pictures’". From the first, deeply textured, strokes of her early works, to the gentle swoops of colour and line in her later landscapes, Morris exhibited a unique style that set her apart from her contemporaries. She painted from sketches, in which she simplified the forms and applied colour in bold, thick patches. Her subject matter reflected her kinship with her surroundings and an appreciation of the simple life. She also felt deeply for the animal world, voicing her concerns publicly to protest the annual seal hunt. Throughout her life, she spent two months of every summer in Marshall's Bay near Arnprior, Ontario, at a small secluded cottage that had been in the family for over a hundred years. There she would paint the fields and sunsets or indulge in her love for animals by painting cows and sheep. In 1983, the Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen's University held a retrospective of her work.

Collections Morris' work is most notably included in the collections of these galleries and museums. She died in Rawdon, Quebec, at the age of 93. Her obituary asked for donations in memoriam to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.