Ivan Morley's paintings are inspired by the frontiersman's lore of scrappy, dried-out California towns with names like San Gabriel, El Monte, and Tehachapi. Such locales and their all-but-forgotten (and possibly artist-fabricated) histories--if you can call tales of memorable cockfights and observations on the behavior of squirrels histories-seem unlikely sources of inspiration.Yet, from a mass of myth, a dose of his own vivid imagination, and a range of raw material, Morley has created some mighty idiosyncratic pictures. The show as a whole was pulled together with a keen sense of detail, with texts telling a few of the stories rendered carefully on the walls. To create his paintings, Morley applies dyed fabric, wax, varnish, dense patches of colored thread, and, occasionally, oil paint to a range of supports that includes denim, glass, linen, and canvas. Sometimes he paints on glass, peels the image off, and affixes it to another support.

Ivan Morley describes his paintings as “poetic myth objects”. Drawing from the Wild West ancestry of his hometown in California, Morley’s works – which range from folk-style illustration to full-fledged abstraction – combine fact and more than a little historical embellishment in their narrative motifs. Using such unorthodox materials as thread, glass, fabric, batik, soap, and KY Jelly, Morley uses the associative and ‘make do’ qualities of his media to give authenticity to his work as handcrafted ‘artefacts’. Morley’s A True Tale is a monumental embroidered wall-hanging. Depicting an ‘impressionistic’ view of a romantic frontier landscape through home-craft, Morley draws upon the connotations of the American sublime, his painting becoming an inspiring testimony to heartfelt endeavour and heartland chintz.van Morley’s Tehachepi takes its title from the name of a small town near Fresno California, in which a ranch was recently purchased to be the site of a Norbertine convent; a true contemporary story, which in Morley’s hands harks back to the days of untamed savage territories yet to be conquest. Rendered over the lustrous sheen of aluminium sheeting, Morley’s abstract pattern is made from cloth and oil paint. Rendered with comic detail, each round form is given anthropomorphic effect. Idiosyncratic and naïve, his TexMex coloured swatches flock in huddled congregation, each an intrinsic, yet individual value of the whole.