Ross Morgan is a South Australian artist, author and composer based in Adelaide. For more than twenty years he has developed a creative practice centred on painting, visual storytelling and imagined worlds, extending into picture books, illustration and music.
Exploration has always been at the heart of Ross's work. Growing up in regional South Australia, he spent much of his childhood exploring abandoned buildings, overgrown places and forgotten environments, looking for creatures, objects and traces of stories hidden among the things people had left behind. That sense of discovery has stayed with him and continues to shape the way he approaches his work.
Working primarily with traditional painting and drawing, Ross creates atmospheric worlds where environment, character and objects can suggest stories of their own. His work often moves between reality and imagination, drawing on memory, mystery and the sense that there is something just beyond the familiar waiting to be discovered. A simple image or idea can become a painting, a story, a book or something much larger.
This way of working has led naturally into picture books and illustration. Ross is particularly interested in wordless storytelling, where images, movement, character and environment can carry a narrative without the need for words. He has worked with Australian publishers and organisations including Walker Books, Hachette and Raising Literacy Australia. His work has been recognised through the John Shaw Neilson Art Prize, Doug Moran National Portrait Prize, Kennedy Art Prize and SCBWI Illustration Awards, including a Crystal Kite Honour, as well as recognition from a number of Australian picture book awards.
Music has been an important part of Ross's creative practice for more than twenty years, developing alongside his visual work. He has explored composition and songwriting, while his current work is focused primarily on ambient and electronic instrumental music. Influenced by film scores and ambient music, as well as the folk, rock and alternative music he grew up with, he approaches music in much the same way as painting, building layers of melody, harmony and texture and allowing a small idea to develop into an atmosphere or narrative. An example of this is Glow, a picture book that grew from a visual idea inspired by a piece of music and went on to become a Crystal Kite Honour-winning book.
Today, Ross sees painting, books, illustration and music as connected ways of exploring the same creative world. These different forms continually influence one another, with ideas moving freely between them. A painting can suggest a story, a story can inspire music, and music can spark a visual idea or open up an imagined place. After many years of keeping his music largely private, he is now bringing it more openly into the practice alongside his visual work.
At the heart of it all is a desire to explore. Whether through a painting, a book, a piece of music or an imagined environment, Ross is interested in what might be discovered just beyond the familiar. His work invites people to pause, look closer and wonder what might be hiding there.