Morrell’s posture is tentative and awkward, his shoulders oppressed by the weight of the huge, empty space. His boyish face looks lost and gaunt. The grid of rafters and beams above appears hard-edged and impersonal, though warmed by yellow light. Yet there is a dignity in the artist’s central, full-frontal pose.

Something of Giacometti’s near-contemporaneous sketchy oil paintings of grey, haunted people stranded against abysmally dark backgrounds, seems present here.

Morrell studied at Kingston School of Art and at the Royal College of Art. Morrell says, ‘I had my first show of [large and rather minimal colour-field] paintings at the New Art Centre, Sloane Street during 1964.’ He relates these to his interests in ‘landscape, the arcane, grid structures, Celtic myth and, overall, colour and texture’. His ‘previous work [had] more of a landscape connection, and Cornish painters between 1950–1960 had a lot of influence on me – Hilton, Blow, Lanyon, Nicholson, as did Tapies, Burri and others.’