A Thoroughly Modern Man.(painter Malcolm Morley)(Brief Article)

A pastel former Methodist church in a manicured, upscale village on Long Island, New York, is perhaps the last place you'd expect to find the painter Malcolm Morley living. As a youth in England, he ran away from the boys' naval school he'd been sent to during World War II. After a disastrous stint as a tugboat galley boy (he broke his leg and was unceremoniously shipped home), he stole a few things and did time in a reform school and in the infamous Wormwood Scrubs prison. Then at art school in 1950s London, Morley recalls, "most of the instructors drank a lot and most of the education was for students privileged enough to go drinking with them." Fortunately, Morley was one of the privileged. Later, as a college art professor in the United States during the 1970s, he was notorious for showing up for class in, well, seriously altered states. For about 20 years he did "carbon-dioxide- inhalation therapy" (which, Morley says, provides weird visions revealing one's innermost self) under the direction of a psychiatrist. And along the way he was also married a few times.

But Morley, now 70, has found a little peace and quiet--not to mention a spacious, light-filled studio--in his formerly ecclesiastical abode. And his current retrospective exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London ("Malcolm Morley: In Full Colour" runs through Aug. 27) finally gives him the homecoming that an artist who was in on the ground floor of both pop art in the 1960s and neo-expressionism in the '70s--and who won the very first Turner Prize in 1984--deserves. The barrel-chested, pugnacious-looking Morley--he could pass for one of Lennox Lewis's cornermen--has also discovered domestic happiness with Dutch-born Lida Kruisheer, whom he married (and who settled him down, a bit) a few years after he bought the church in 1985.

Morley's approach to painting is as unusual as his biography. Originally directed toward art by a kindly jail warden, he was fascinated early on by both the idea of the romantic, loner artist (he was especially impressed by "Lust for Life," Irving Stone's novel about Vincent van Gogh) and the discipline involved in painting realistically. After a foray into an elegant, restrained white-on-white version of abstract expressionism in the early '60s, Morley started to insert fragmentary ship images into dourly tonal abstractions. The ships became whole boats, and one day he decided he wanted to paint a big cruise ship. So Morley, who had immigrated to New York in 1958, walked down to the Manhattan piers to find one. The trouble was, as he puts it in the retrospective's catalog, "one end [of the ship] is over there, the other end is over there, a 360-degree impossibility." So he bought a bright postcard at the shipping office and took it home to copy--which for Morley consisted of drawing a ruled grid on top of the postcard, drawing a similar grid but with bigger squares on a canvas and then replicating the source image, unit by completely finished unit.

Although Morley's style has changed several times since the cruise-ship pictures, he's been constantly obsessed with the question of where, and how, an artist's creativity actually gets into his work. "I wonder," he says during a break from the studio, "about what is 'copying' and what is not copying. ...