OXFORD, Ohio - “Philip Morsberger: A Retrospective,” an exhibition of the artist’s works from the 1960s to the present, opens at the Miami University Art Museum Thursday, Feb. 7. Morsberger will speak at 7 p.m., followed by a public reception. A members-only reception begins at 6 p.m.

In this review of five decades of a daily commitment to painting, Morsberger describes his work as a continuum of “color, craft and things theological.”

Morsberger has had a “passion for painting” for over 50 years, explains art historian Christopher Lloyd in his recent monograph on the artist. Born in 1933 in Baltimore, Md., Morsberger studied art in the 1950s at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh and at the Ruskin School of Drawing in Oxford, England. He was caught between the abstract expressionist approach to art emphasized at Carnegie Tech and the more formal, traditional teachings at the Ruskin, but he benefited from both.

The draftsmanship skills that he acquired at the Ruskin are evident in all his work, especially in his early works from the 1960s, which were strongly influenced by current social issues and injustices. The abstraction emerged later as his figures became more whimsical and cartoonish and his palette became bolder and more complex. Lloyd refers to this later work as “Magical Realism.”

Upon his return to America he joined the faculty of art at Miami University in 1959, where he taught until 1968. Thus began his long career as academician and artist, during which he returned to England in 1971 as the Ruskin Master of Drawing at Oxford, where he established a new degree, the Baccalaureus in Bellis Artibus. Returning to the United States in 1984, Morsberger spent two years in Minnesota before moving to Berkeley, Calif., serving first at UC Berkeley and then as President’s Fellow in Painting and Drawing at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland and San Francisco. In 1996 he was appointed William S. Morris Eminent Scholar in Art at Augusta State University in Ga., Emeritus since 2002.

This retrospective of works by Philip Morsberger presents an opportunity to survey the artist’s entire life of expression through art. The civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam and the turmoil of the 1960s had a strong influence on Morsberger’s early work. His interpretation of these events provides a visual record of the era.

His response to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 is a work painted like a film clip to evoke a feeling of action and viewer participation. Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, who were murdered in Mississippi by members of the Ku Klux Klan, were memorialized in a painting, while the guilty parties were depicted in another work.

While at the Ruskin School of Drawing, Morsberger began to paint in a more abstract style, using color as his primary tool. A reaction to the dark tragedies of the 1960s, this work is referred to by Morsberger as “mindscapes” or “inscapes.”

In the 1980s Morsberger continued with abstraction, sometimes with a comedic narrative that recalls his early passion for comic strips. Influences from his childhood pervade his work and seem to filter their way more prominently into his later work as autobiographical stories and reminiscences.

Morsberger continues to work in this manner, without a preliminary sketch and without any preconception about the outcome of the painting. He allows the color and the application of it to evolve into a narrative on an abstract background, with figurative elements breaking through. By thinking in Technicolor, Morsberger creatively combines his early teachings with his lifelong discoveries.

Art museum hours are 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and noon-5 p.m. Saturday. Admission is free. For more information, call (513) 529-2232, or visit: http://arts.muohio.edu/art-museum.