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By the early '70s Morley's painting was largely about violence happening to a spuriously calm surface. In Los Angeles Yellow Pages, 1971, a jagged rip appears in a huge Los Angeles phone-directory cover, thus eerily predicting the city's real 1971 earthquake. A postcard scene of Piccadilly Circus, 1973, is incoherently violated by blurts and blobs of paint; they include a quantity of gray that has leaked from a bunch of bags hanging from the top of the canvas. Morley invited some friends to shoot arrows into them and re lease the paint, and the arrows remain stuck in the picture, thus supplying a missing figure: Eros, the god of love, with his bow, who stands on the fountain at the middle of the actual Piccadilly Circus. The image is a memorial to Morley's marriage, which had collapsed in bitter disarray a short time before.
More recently, the work has become, if not exactly more amiable, less wrenched by signs of aggression. It preserves its haunting collisions of imagery; who knows what the elephant is doing beside the field-hospital tent in M.A.S.H., 1978, or why the white figure is on its head—an effigy of his father, according to Morley—or why they are all in the Florida greenery? His paintings hop between memory and desire; infantile recollection, fragments of autobiography, references to historical art, all get crushed together. In the process he will quote anyone from Pollaiuolo (in La Plage, 1980) to the ineffable LeRoy Neiman.
When Morley is spinning his fables around a core of imagery that the viewer cannot quite grasp, his real successes occur. A painting like Underneath the Lemon Tree, 1981, cannot be fully read. One knows it is about aggression: Morley's toy soldiers again, two ancient Egyptians and a modern member of the Horse Guards, plus a scrawled, emblematic castle. But what are they doing in the green space that is Morley's sign for paradise? The probable answer is that they are there because they are in the artist; the combinations of aggro-and-bother with glimpses of lush relaxation and childhood escape epitomize his own conflicts. When painting "straight" landscape, Morley is less convincing, producing huge pictures of wobbly livestock under a crude Constable sky. At such moments he reminds one that there is not only good art and bad art but bad "bad painting" and good "bad painting." Fortunately, most of Morley falls in the first and the last of these four categories. —By Robert Hughes