Morag Caister (b.1994) is an award winning London based figurative-portrait artist working mostly in oils and pastel on paper and calico or raw canvas. Since graduating from the University of Brighton with a Painting BA in 2019 Caister has been shortlisted for awards and participated in competitions, and has exhibited in the UK and abroad. In Tirana, Albania, she recently had her first solo show. Morag Caister is this year’s winner of Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year.
Tender, truthful, touching. Morag Caister’s figures hold their spaces on the page with a truth that goes beyond mere slavish representation. Her characters are honest, open, engaged and, despite the fragmentation of colour from which they are composed, have a strange fullness and completeness about them that somehow allows you to understand them and their physicality in the space. Caister’s bodies are sparingly filled in, often floating, lost in the emptiness of the space that surrounds them, and her delicacy of touch, her understanding of, and sheer brilliance with line add up to something wholly persuasive and singularly seductive.
Kathleen Soriano (Independent Curator, Cultural Consultant, Broadcaster)