William Morgan
William Morgan’s drawings begin with images that arrive before language. Often rooted in emotional states or internal conflicts, his work brings together figures, thresholds, altered landscapes, and chimera-like bodies to give form to experiences that resist easy explanation. He describes the resulting works as “maps of my internal landscape,” shaped by psychological tension and a sense of an environment in transition.
Morgan’s early route into art was through comic books. A highly imaginative child, he found in their heroes both escape and an entry point into drawing. He taught himself by copying cartoon characters and comic-book figures before encountering Stan Lee and John Buscema’s How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way around the age of twelve. The book provided his first introduction to perspective, foreshortening, composition, and figure drawing.
He continued to draw through high school and later took local college courses, working in oil, charcoal, and pastel. Charcoal and pastel felt particularly natural after years with a pencil, though he eventually stepped away from drawing for nearly two decades. In 2019, inspired by the lectures of Terence McKenna, Morgan returned to the medium. A T-shirt business that relied on regular Instagram posts led him to make digital collages at speed, initially as a practical way to generate new material. Collage soon became integral to his process, particularly as a means of planning his compositions.
Colored pencil remains central to Morgan’s practice. He values its tactile, deliberate quality while attempting to move the medium toward the atmosphere and depth of painting. “I often think of myself as a line artist trying to become a painter,” he says. Rather than treating a work as a final demonstration of skill, he uses each drawing to address difficulties encountered in the last, whether that means hair, fabric, composition, or atmosphere.
The imagery is frequently quiet but unsettled. Windows, doors, and other thresholds recur alongside figures that merge with their surroundings, reflecting an interest in states of uncertainty and change. Morgan cites Zdzisław Beksiński’s dreamlike landscapes of decay and isolation, as well as Symbolism, Surrealism, and H. R. Giger. H. P. Lovecraft has also been an important influence, particularly the writer’s use of the sea as a metaphor for contact with forces that overwhelm and alter the self.
That metaphor has become the basis for a developing body of work. Morgan recently completed a series of seven drawings, with an unofficial eighth, depicting women gradually transforming into squid-like beings. Repetition helped him clarify his visual language and recognize recurring strengths and limitations in his process. He now plans another series of ten or more drawings that continues his exploration of the sea, adaptation, endurance, and transformation.
Morgan builds each work slowly. Once he has identified a promising image, he develops a digital collage to establish the composition and references. He works across the whole surface rather than completing one isolated area at a time, usually advancing the background slightly ahead of the central subject. The approach keeps the most engaging part of the drawing for later while allowing the overall image to remain responsive.
Patience has become a defining part of that method. In a recent drawing informed by medieval tapestries, Morgan spent almost a month rendering leaves one by one before beginning the central figure. He sees technical skill as a form of language, but his aim is not virtuosity for its own sake. The work is intended as a means of connection, making images that can carry something of an experience beyond the artist’s own imagination.
