Still Life with Clown

'I became much more conscious of the formal values that a still-life can actually give freedom for - so that I began to look at still-life from this point of view, not simply depicting a few apples or oranges or a couple of jugs and so forth, as a kind of theme - but simply the relationship of the shape of a jug to the shape of a compote or the shape of a pear or the colour of a few objects on a white table-cloth against something in the background. You can actually use the shapes within a still-life just as you would in an abstract because they don't necessarily have to tell any story - apart from their own existence' (C.Young and V. Keller, Alberto Morrocco 1917-1998, Edinburgh, 2008, p. 92).

In the 1990s Morrocco travelled a great deal and this led to a greater explosion of colour, as is evident in Still Life with Clown. The clown on the left of the painting is likely to be his own humorous self-image; as his daughter recalled, 'it wasn't unusual to find Dad dressed up as a clown or wearing a curiosity from his hat collection' (private correspondence, Annalisa Morrocco, 2012).