Lily Morris

b. Martha’s Vineyard, MA, 1988

Lily Morris is a painter who applies a hyper-realist technique to surrealist scenes, defined by dramatic foreshortening and figures suspended in air. Morris is inspired by the drama and heavenly perspective of Italian Renaissance painters, something that she absorbed while studying at Studio Art Centers International in Florence. Morris invokes natural elements—clouds, birds, beams of light—to illustrate an emotional charge within her compositions. She appropriates the archetypal narrative arcs of epics and Christian mythologies, pointing to Thomas Cole’s allegorical “The Voyage of Life” as one of her inspirations.

Morris’s paintings have the quality of movie stills, capturing the kinetic energy of a narrative action. Her parents are both documentary filmmakers and would take her on set as a child, which inspired her subsequent series of paintings. For Morris, painting is obsessive. In her series Coming of Age, for example, she searched frame by frame through videos of horse-jumping accidents and failed stunts. She also watched videos of people sneezing. Morris says: “Those are very honest physical gestures I’m attracted to. Especially in the internet age when your awareness curates everything you do,” she said.

Morris grew up on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts and graduated from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, MA in 2009. Morris spent several years working a slew of odd jobs in Brooklyn. She fabricated pieces for other artists, painted abstractions for hotel rooms, and edited wedding footage. In 2015, she left Brooklyn for Hudson, New York and devoted herself to artistic practice. Since then, Morris’s work has been featured in the Netflix original film Bird Box, Playboy Magazine, and in the HBO series The Undoing and The Perfect Couple. She currently lives and works in Chatham, NY.