Artist
Morag Caister
Morag is a British portrait artist interested in what links us together as humans. Her figurative drawings celebrate the routine and mundane behaviours and poses we all assume. Her relatable portraits often play out in sequences, giving the sense of more than one day being described at a time or of the passing of time. The work seeks to examine "the authentic self" through depicting candid posture, body language, and expressions, both as a crowd or an individual. She currently uses soft pastel and oils on paper or calico to create interesting tones and marks.
Morag graduated from the University of Brighton in 2019 and is now working in London, having spent a brief time in Albania for her first solo show in Tirana. She has work in The Soho House permanent collection and in 2021 Morag was announced as one of six winners of The Curators EROS Project Award and was shortlisted for The Self-Portrait Award hosted by The Ruth Borchard Collection as well as exhibiting extensively worldwide. She has also won Sky's Portrait Artist of The Year 2022.
"Painting gives small but intense bursts of clarity, like having moments of access to an entire secret landscape that's existing somewhere out of sight. I just want to see it again and again and each new painting might take me closer to it, like going to the same spot every day because there was a time you were sure you saw a mermaid there. Each work always has the chance for it to happen again, and each time it's over it's hard to believe the feeling was there, but you're left with the memory of it and with the certainty that something you don't understand exists." — Morag Caister
Shop by Collection
November Drop 2024
"In this body of work I was searching for rainbow coloured patches on the figure and letting these summarise the person like a constellation, using a lighter pencil for the lines instead of paint so that the pieces of colour feel brighter and petal-like." - Morag Caister, Iridescent Parts
Solo Collection - June 2024
"The collection is a series of landscape studies created during the NG Art Creative Residency in Moulin de Greoux, Southern France during May. As an artist who usually works with the figure, the works became scenes of yearning, introspection and solitude that acknowledged the lack of other human presence amongst the vibrancy of late spring in Provence." - Morag Caister, Moulin de Greoux Landscapes
March Drop 2024
“Studies of friends and family in post-work or weekend form, in familiar & close spaces of either home or the studio.” - Morag Caister, Sofa Studies
May Drop 2023
"Thoughts and observations during the change of season into warmer days." - Morag Caister, Spring Effect
Feb Drop 2023
"These works are a group of studies meeting people in their natural ways and forging a rainbow-tinged understanding between my world and theirs." - Morag Caister
Drop 5 - Winter 2022
"These works summarise a direction that my practice is heading in that I feel so good and excited about, it’s a mixture of colourful portrait-based figurative work that I’m finding exhilarating because it’s relatively new, and it’s felt so easy to express myself with it. It's been a dreamy phase of painting where the works feel light and effortless and I'm making the most of it before it moves along to something else!" - Morag Caister
The Artist Open Call Collection
'I found myself a bit obsessed with Morag's evocative and arresting portraits, how they said so much about each subject with so little. She is definitely one to watch in this industry!' — Yomi Adegoke, Writer
