Key Biscayne Florida 1983

Curator: We’re now looking at Malcolm Morley’s watercolor, "Key Biscayne Florida," completed in 1983. Editor: My initial reaction is… breezy! There's an almost carefree, splashy quality to it that really evokes the feeling of being near the ocean. Curator: Indeed. Morley painted this en plein air, which lends itself to that sense of immediacy. He moved from abstract expressionism to a representational style, but with a distinctive looseness. We can trace that sensibility to modernism's broader interrogation of subjective experience in the everyday. Think of what this tropical paradise may have symbolized within the shifting political climate of the 1980s, especially in relation to tourism and leisure as industries that reshape entire island ecologies. Editor: The palm trees are the dominant visual motif, aren't they? They serve as a long-standing cultural signifier, an almost ubiquitous symbol for a specific kind of relaxed luxury and escape. And the repetition...they're almost iconic. They give you that mental picture-postcard impression of the Keys. But also that shadow… that gives pause and a moment to wonder about exploitation or the more troubled or toxic aspects of paradisiacal marketing, too. Curator: That push and pull between attraction and tension resonates here. Look how the perspective distorts— it disrupts a clear, straightforward reading of paradise. It’s far from the flawless promotional image, but something far more emotionally complex that is not merely just surface, especially for the 1980s and its many undercurrents related to globalization. Editor: Absolutely. Even the shades of blues he's chosen feel loaded with implication. There's an intense vibrancy and then some murkiness... Like the dream and nightmare entwined in the American quest for ideal life. It gives a bit of symbolic foreboding… almost… which might speak to his life in the shadow of WWII as a child. Curator: Well said! Morley offers us, here, a space to contemplate the layered realities behind idyllic fantasies and question them as a viewer through social position, too. Editor: Yes! I now walk away from this imagining all of what isn’t said through our own, deeply personal relationship to water, sun and the art of getting away.