Abstract painter Doug Morton, best known in the Canadian art community as a member of The Regina Five, has died in Victoria at 77.
Born in 1926 in Winnipeg, Morton initially pursued commercial art, studying in the Manitoba capital, then in Los Angeles, Paris and London before becoming curator of the Calgary Allied Arts Centre. But from 1954 onward he found himself in Regina as manager of the local office of his family's firm, MacKay-Morton, which colleague Ted Godwin remembers as distributing pipe for industrial and construction uses.
Mark Wihak, who produced and directed a 2001 documentary about The Regina Five, said Morton would run the office by day, help his wife take care of their six children, then retire to his basement to paint until midnight, rising at 6 a.m. to paint again for two hours.
Able to handle people and money, the quiet-spoken Morton was the MacKenzie Art Gallery's first acquisitions chairman, securing for it an early work by a then-obscure artist named Harold Town.
In 1961 Morton - along with Ken Lochhead, Art McKay, Ron Bloore and Ted Godwin - exhibited at the National Gallery of Canada in the show Five Painters From Regina. The show established Regina firmly on the national arts map and the group was briefly the hottest thing in Canadian art.
"McKay was the guru, Ken Lochhead was the administrator, Bloore was the old man, I was the rising star and Morton, well, he was just a member because nobody ever understood what Doug did," said Godwin, one of three survivors of the group.
In 1967, Morton joined the University of Saskatchewan's Regina campus as director of visual arts and associate professor of art. He left in 1969 for Toronto's York University, where for the next 11 years he held a variety of posts, including management ones, in its fine arts faculty. All this time he continued to paint - a 1980 Arts Canada review called Morton one of the two finest and subtlest colourists in the country.
Morton was dean of fine arts at the University of Victoria from 1980 to 1985 and president of the then-new Alberta College of Art from 1985 to 1987.