Jo Morris Uses Soft Blues, Pinks and Purples to Paint Calm Dreamlike Worlds

At Women in Arts Network, for our Landscapes and Places exhibition, we received work filled with mountains, coastlines, deserts, skies, and carefully painted locations from around the world. And then there are artists like Jo Morris, whose landscapes feel less like places you visit and more like places you remember emotionally.

Jo is a selected artist for the exhibition, and what stayed with us immediately was the atmosphere inside her paintings. The soft horizons. The glowing colour. The feeling that the landscape is dissolving slightly while you look at it, like a memory trying to hold onto its shape. And honestly, that feeling makes sense once you hear where the work comes from.

Jo grew up between two very different worlds. Part of her childhood was spent in remote desert communities in Western Australia and the Northern Territory, surrounded by vast open landscapes and silence.

The other half was spent near the coast in Adelaide. Then adulthood carried her through Canberra, Perth, New Zealand, even the mountains of Utah. Different climates. Different skies. Different kinds of light. You can feel all of that sitting inside the work.

But what’s interesting is that she no longer paints directly from photographs or from life the way she once did. The landscapes now come from memory. From the emotional feeling of being in those places rather than the exact visual details of them.

That shift changed everything. Because her paintings stopped becoming about documenting a location and started becoming about atmosphere instead. The softness in the work, the dreamlike edges, the way forms dissolve into colour all of it comes from remembering rather than recording.

And colour plays a huge role in that emotional world. She works instinctively, often beginning with only a few colours on the canvas and letting the painting slowly reveal where it wants to go. Pinks dissolve into oranges, blues into purples, light emerging through layers of water-based inks, pigments, sprays, and washes until the landscape feels almost suspended somewhere between reality and imagination.

There’s something deeply optimistic in the work too. Not in a loud way. In a quiet emotional way. The kind that makes you feel calmer after standing in front of it for a while.

And maybe that’s why people connect to the paintings so personally. Because they don’t just look like landscapes. They feel like relief.

Let’s get to know Jo through our conversation with her about painting from memory instead of reference, chasing atmosphere through colour and light, and creating landscapes that feel less like destinations and more like emotional sanctuaries.

Q1. For someone discovering you or your work for the first time how would you introduce yourself and your creative practice?

My paintings are windows into sanctuaries of calm, providing the viewer with the space to breathe, soften and connect with nature. Soothing, luminous and atmospheric – each landscape is intuitively created as a mediator between memory and place. My work honors my mother and late father, who described my art as ‘magic’.

They gifted me my love of nature, an adventurous spirit, and countless experiences exploring new places. Half of my childhood was spent in extremely remote desert communities in Western Australia and Northern Territory with the other half in coastal suburbs of Adelaide, South Australia. My adult life has seen me work in Canberra, Perth, to the snow-capped mountains of New Zealand and Utah in the United States. This diversity of landscape appears in my artwork.

Q2. Your landscapes have a soft, dreamlike atmosphere that almost slips into abstraction, what draws you to that kind of space rather than more defined landscapes?

I create each landscape through an intuitive painting process that I have developed through my practice. This process is based on my memories of places – capturing the atmosphere or feeling of that place. I am in awe of the beauty in nature/landscapes, and I am constantly observing shifts of light, colours changing with that shift of light, the movement of clouds, sunrise, sunsets, textures and forms.

I no longer paint from actual references like plain air or photographs as I did when I started painting, but from memories of my observations and experiences/feelings being in landscape. I think it is painting from memory that creates the dissolving and dreamlike quality in my work. I paint how I feel and see in my day-to-day life, and I truly see the beauty in the natural world every time I experience it.

Q3. When creating for exhibitions, does your process change at all, or do you simply continue making the work that feels most personal and compelling to you?

It can be both of these scenarios. For instance, for the Independent Visions Art Prize 2026 I selected from pieces that I had already recently painted that I felt were the strongest from my latest collection. Of the 2 that were selected one of my paintings won the People’s Choice Award with over 300 people voting during the exhibition duration. That particular painting titled ‘Ikara (Flinders Ranges)’ I felt was the strongest (and also my personal favourite) from this series so far.

It was invaluable feedback that what resonates the best with me also strongly resonates with the public and the majority of people that viewed it amongst other highly skilled work. I was delighted and it encourages me to keep putting my work out there in the world. For other exhibitions & art prizes, I do paint according to the brief or theme of the show if one is given. Having been an interior and graphic designer in the past, I do enjoy working to a brief. It adds another layer of challenge, and I like that it can potentially lead you to discover a new technique or new direction in your work.

Q4. When someone takes home one of your atmospheric paintings, what do you hope they continue to feel or discover while living with it?

I am fortunate to have had several buyers of my paintings give me feedback. One lady at an art market recognised my work and said she had bought a print off me 12 years ago and to this day it still brings her joy every time she sees it. Another buyer stated that my work gives them a sense of ‘calm energy’. A few others say that my work brings them happiness, and the most recent sale the owner said my painting makes her smile every time she sees it in her kitchen/dining room.

With this feedback I have come to realise that people are not just buying artwork or a painting from me, they are also buying a feeling; the feeling my artwork give them. That is super special and means a lot to me. I am a positive and optimistic person by nature, and I am sincerely grateful that my work can bring calm, joy, happiness and make people smile – how lovely is that!

Q5. Your pastel palettes pinks into purples, peaches into blues very intuitive. Do colour or mood usually lead the painting?

I have always been confident using colour, I don’t know if that is inherent or learned over time with theory and practice, but probably both. When I start a painting I may have a specific colour combination I want to work with that day and immediately put those colours down on the canvas. Otherwise, I tend to start with yellow and then either add blues that creates a yellow/blue/green direction, or again start with yellow and add pinks/reds to create a yellow/pink/orange/red direction and then the purples come in to either of those colour schemes by adding either blues to reds or vice versa.

I am very much led by colour and my process/medium (usually water based inks, watercolours, water based acrylic spray/ink spray, and dye or dry pigments activated by water) more than chasing a specific mood. I let that guide me until I see the image/landscape emerge and then I bring that out in the final stages of my process by adding in some further form/texture/line, finding the light, thinking about the light source and how light behaves in the landscape and contrast with darks.

Q6. What does a typical day in your studio look like when you’re immersed in creating a new painting?  

I am totally addicted to painting and I crave getting in my studio to work, especially if it is starting a new piece. Before I even get into my studio I have already been thinking about the painting the night before and in the morning in my mind (not the form or specific landscape) but more just a general musing over colour combinations I would like to start with next – based on inspiration from real life or other paintings that I am drawn to, but being very open with where my painting may take me.

I never know how they will look when I start and when I finish and that is truly exciting to me. It does feel like magic. After I look after my beautiful dog in the morning where we both enjoy our nature walks together, I head into my studio, make a coffee, decide which canvas size to work on as working small, medium and large can be quite a different experience.

I often listen to my favourite music when I paint so I put that on and then get to it laying down the colour and see where it takes me and then where I take it! it is that push and pull with me and the painting, until I feel it works as a finished piece and trying to know when to stop so you don’t overwork it as you can sometimes lose something in the previous version/layer.

Q7. You’ve spoken about how hard it is to capture scale on a screen, how different is the experience of seeing your work in person versus online?

When you view original paintings through a screen online or even a photograph in a book, magazine or catalogue for instance, it already has created a distance or a separation between you and the artwork. In this separation or distance you are not only losing a sense of scale and possibly inaccurate colour, you are losing a lot of what the art ACTUALLY FEELS like when it is in front of you in real life. This has happened to me so often when I view a painting online or in a publication and then I go see it in the gallery and it astounds me how the real painting makes me feel something so deeply which it never has in just viewing an image of it.

I have cried my eyes out in galleries in front of paintings that move me, I don’t think I have even done that looking at the image of an original artwork. That is why it’s important to keep supporting galleries, exhibitions/openings and the viewing of original paintings in real life otherwise you won’t get the full impact and feeling the work can give you.

Q8. When you step back from a finished painting, what tells you it’s successful a specific feeling, or something more intuitive?

It is often said that knowing when to stop can be one of the hardest things for an artist. For me I try to step back and really look at my work through the processes and stages. I often can then see the elements of it that I really love/are working and conversely the elements that either need more work refining or need to change altogether. Its not always easy to do this though and sometimes it can help to leave it and work on another painting, or go away and come back to it later with fresh eyes.

Sometimes if I find I am really stuck I like to ask the opinion of my fellow artists in the studios around where I work, sometimes you need a totally different perspective to see the forest from the trees if you are too immersed in the work.

Q8. Are there themes, landscapes, or visual ideas you’re particularly excited to explore in the next phase of your work?  

I am super excited about the next phase of my work. I will continue to do the work I do now as it has been popular and really well received, and I genuinely enjoy the process. However after selling 12 paintings from my recent exhibition, I have reinvested the money in some new and different art materials.

I have begun to explore adding these new materials to my existing process and getting some great results so far. In addition to working with these new materials I would like to try to further abstract my landscapes, seeing how far I can push that with the aim of creating dreamscapes/futurescapes that I define as magical or fantasy landscapes.

Q9. For artists who may be struggling with confidence or direction in their work, what would you encourage them to remember?  

Confidence in anything comes from doing. So just work at it more. Paint as much as you can. I paint almost every day now that I have made a commitment to my art career and a lot of things now have to come second to that. I am often in my studio late into the night every day, even Friday and Saturday nights when people are out to dinner or the movies or catching up with friends around me in the city centre where I work, I am painting.

The truth is I would rather be painting than out to dinner etc I enjoy it so much. Also, in my experience, inspiration and direction comes from doing/working too. So my advice to other artists struggling is don’t search for inspiration or direction from elsewhere, just keep painting/keep working/keep exploring different materials, processes, subject matter until the inspiration and direction you are seeking appears. It lies within you. It comes from you. From your work.

That is what I did in creating my first cohesive body of work, I was just exploring new materials and processes and something clicked and I just keep doing it. Just keep going and I hope something from what you are working on resonates enough with you that you start to feel confident enough and enjoy doing it enough(!) to continue. It is not always easy I know, but I do believe the reward of creating is worth the effort.

As we wrapped our conversation with Jo, we kept thinking about the word she used herself — magic.

Not in an exaggerated way. Just that feeling of making something that changes the atmosphere around you the moment you stand in front of it. Because her paintings really do feel like that.

You look at them and something softens a little. Your breathing slows down. The colours feel warm without overwhelming you. The landscapes don’t demand anything from you except a moment of stillness. And honestly, that feels rare now.

We loved hearing her talk about people living with her work over the years. Someone remembering a print they bought more than a decade ago because it still brings them joy every day. Someone describing the paintings as “calm energy.” Someone smiling every time they pass a piece hanging in their kitchen.

That says everything, really. People aren’t only connecting to the image itself. They’re connecting to how the work makes them feel inside their own homes and lives. And that’s what makes her work linger.

For collectors and people building spaces they want to truly live in, Jo’s paintings feel like the kind of work that changes a room emotionally. Not loudly. Quietly. The light shifts across the surface during the day. Different colours emerge at different hours. Some days the work feels peaceful, other days almost nostalgic.

You keep finding yourself returning to it. And maybe that’s because the paintings themselves were created from memory, feeling, and lived experience rather than direct observation. They carry that emotional softness with them. There’s something deeply human about that.

To follow Jo’s journey and see more of her work, find her through the links below.