Hard To Say (Self-Portrait) Painting

Morag Caister (born 1994) is a British painter currently living between London, UK and Tirana, Albania, after graduating in Painting (BA) from the University of Brighton in 2019. Morag contested as a semi-finalist in the 2020 series of Sky Arts: Portrait Artist of the Year, and has been included in multiple prestigious open calls, most notably The Football Art Prize, The Ruth Borchard Self-Portrait Award 2021, ING Discerning Eye and Figurative Art Now (Mall Galleries). She has exhibited with Blue Shop Cottage, London Paint Club and Gallery 94 at Glyndebourne. Most recently Morag was announced as a winner of The Curators EROS Project Open Call award, and will have a self portrait hung in the permanent collection of the brand new Soho House Brighton. Morag is interested in what links us together, maintaining a figurative and portrait based practice focusing on routine and automatic behaviour within relatable, resting imagery that has a sense of more than one day being described at a time. The work seeks to describe our familiarities and authentic nature of ourselves through candid posture, body language and expressions, as a crowd or an individual. Sometimes this is explored by direct representation in the form of a portrait, and other times the work is more lucid and colours and shapes make up the expressive qualities in her paintings. Morag sometimes uses an unusual technique of crumbling soft pastel or pigment into chalk house paint to get the desired tones in her portraits. Other usual materials are oils, pastels, paper and raw canvas or calico.