CULTURE
would stay at a place near Rome called Anticoli Corrado. It had been an artists’ colony, where the Roman school of painting had been estab- lished and where it thrived from the 1920s to the 1940s. That’s where I started painting. I would be taking my father his lunch as he was painting away in the blazing heat.’ Young Leon soon got bored and began to
draw. ‘It seems now,’ he says, ‘as if I was always going to be an artist. My father didn’t push me into it. I just landed up in art school.’ Unfortunately, Morrocco junior’s first year at
Edinburgh College of Art was spent under the tutelage of his own father. ‘I soon realised this wasn’t a good idea,’ he laughs. ‘I was never actu- ally against what he was doing. I just wanted to do my own thing. ’ There were other factors too, he says, which
provoked a move to London. ‘When I was at Edinburgh, Robin Philipson was the college’s head of painting. I was into people like Morandi – you know: limited colour, considered compo- sition. I remember Philipson once stopped a whole class to show how not to paint, through my interpretation of Morandi.’ By the early 1960s Morrocco was studying
in London. ‘I went to the Slade. William Cold- stream was in charge there and his approach was a bit like knitting. You would spend no fewer than two weeks in the life room. It was very calculated. I couldn’t do it temperamentally. I think his method was really a misconception of Cézanne. It eliminated the emotional response to the model.’ I wonder what Morrocco considers to have
influenced his art back then, at a crucial stage in its development. ‘There were so many influ- ences,’ he replies. ‘The Young Contemporaries was what was all the rage then but I wasn’t all that receptive to pop culture. I was into jazz. I think that the London jazz scene was an influ- ence. One of the things about being a figurative painter is that you’re anchored, you’re respond- ing to all sorts of stimuli. The intellectual side took second place for me – it still does. If I walk down a street in India, for instance, and I see a woman in a pink sari standing against a yellow wall, I just think, wow!’ Morrocco speaks of India, Italy and Australia
with an easy familiarity. In 1979, at the age of 37, he moved to Australia with his own family, prompted in part at
least by the continuing
need to break free from the legacy of his father 84
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