John Morrell’s first solo exhibition in New York at the Prince Street Gallery brings together the strong landscape tradition in American painting with the contemporary concerns and issues of urban development, preservation of the natural environment and perceptions of our surroundings. Morrell’s new landscapes explore the half-hidden spaces where nature takes hold between buildings and behind walls and fences in urban and suburban environments.  These paintings present the contrast between the dynamic activity of nature and the man-made structures that delimit and define it. These spaces and the boundaries that surround them, simultaneously include and exclude the viewer.

John Morrell Drawing On Tradition
November 13 - December 1, 2007
Atlantic Gallery
135 West 29th Street, Suite 601
New York, New York 10001

A native of Albany, New York, John Morrell has painted and taught in the Washington, DC area for over thirty years. He teaches Painting and Drawing, and coordinates the Painting program at Georgetown University. Morrell's first solo exhibition showed landscape paintings done in Brittany, France in 1978.  Seventeen other solo exhibitions followed, along with many group exhibitions, and numerous commissions for private and corporate collections.  In 1980 the Smithsonian American Art Museum acquired Morrell’s mixed-media drawing Chateau IV.  Curator Willem de Looper of the Phillips Collection awarded Morrell’s painting Reverie "Best in Show" at Athenaeum's Fourteenth Annual Juried Show in 1984.  The United States Postal Service selected Morrell's depiction of Georgetown University’s Healy Hall for a postcard in their historic building series in 1989.  Morrell has worked outside the DC area. In 1994 at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts he received a Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Fellowship.  In 2004 at the Savannah College of Art and Design Morrell, as a Visiting Artist and guest lecturer, presented From The Ground Up, a solo exhibition of grisaille drawings.  In 2005 Galerie Lee in Paris featured his urban landscapes in a solo exhibition.  In 2006 John Morrell participated in group exhibitions at New York's Sherry French Gallery and the “Trash” exhibition at Atlantic Gallery in SoHo. He is reprsented by Sherry French Gallery in New York and Addison-Ripley Fine Art in Washington, DC. He is a participating member of the New York non-profit artist cooperative, Atlantic Gallery.