There is a piece of paper in a house in the Dandenong Ranges, in the hills east of Melbourne, that Connor Morton thinks is still there. He wrote on it one night, addressed it to the universe, and asked for a kookaburra, an Australian bird. The next morning the first thing he saw was a kookaburra. “Hmm, is that a coincidence, like, they’re very common in my area,” so the following night he asked for something harder, a balloon. In the morning the first thing on his Facebook was a balloon emoji. He told his boss he was quitting in six weeks, gave up the clothing brand he had been running since he was sixteen, and moved to Bali, where he has now lived for almost four years.

He wrote that note to the universe at the end of a year he talks about without dressing it up. He wanted to move out of his parents’ house and buy his own, so he stopped running the brand for eight or nine months and put everything he earned into savings. He worked a regular job to hold it all together. He went to house after house and was turned down, and then prices in Australia climbed past what the bank would lend him. “I remember I was so depressed. I hated my job.” He woke up every morning hoping the job would end. He was not making anything. It was a friend in America, a man of thirty-six, who listened to him complain about all of it and told him to ask the universe a question. Connor was sceptical. He did it anyway.

Making things had started long before that year. At thirteen he was DJing house music with his cousin, producing remixes and mixtapes, playing “18th birthday parties, 21st, 40th, like any opportunity that I had.” At sixteen, with two older sisters six and eight years ahead of him pulling him toward fashion, he started a label called Connorson. He taught himself to design t-shirts, make logos, print and shoot photographs. At seventeen he designed fifty watches and sold them, having learned to deal with manufacturers on Alibaba during school hours he mostly spent on the business.

The first design Connorson ever made was an arrow. He still explains it the same way: “life pulls you back into sadness, disappointment, depression, all these things. But if you keep holding on, it will eventually let go and it will go forward.” He drew it as a teenager who was already being watched. DJing at thirteen, the label at sixteen, modelling, then Los Angeles at nineteen, making content for brands like Converse and Puma. “At such a young age, I got a lot of hate. A lot, a lot of hate.” He kept most of it to himself.

The label went up and down for years. He built small worlds around each collection. For a wilderness line he shot everything on film in a forest and put a compass in every order, because “If you’re ever in the wilderness, you need a compass before you get lost.” Then COVID came, and Australia wanted loungewear, and he would not make loungewear. “I’m not a person to hop on trends.” One of his last collections was built around an art gallery. Stuck at home, he had started painting with his mother, an interior designer. When a canvas came out imperfect he got angry at it, so he found a way through: “I’d have like a glass of red wine or a shot of vodka to let loose and just be free with the canvas.”

In Bali he built a living in marketing. About two and a half years ago, in a life he calls beautiful, “there was something missing.” He considered going back to fashion and decided against it. Then came a date on the beach with the woman he was seeing at the time, with red wine and a few canvases. Two weeks later he had started painting under his middle name, Sydney.

He never went to art school and says he is “terrible at drawing.” What he does instead is tape a long stick to the end of a brush, stand back from the canvas and close his eyes. “Whatever I do, that is when I create the best work.” He keeps notes, and one reads: “I’m interested in capturing what something felt rather than exactly what it looked like.” The material comes from wherever he is: a scene in a film, an outfit on someone walking past, a song. His music runs from country to rap to techno to jazz. 

Most of the first year went badly. He was trying to make a perfect piece every time, and the colours kept running into each other. “Too many colors made it brown, and we call that muddy in the art world.” He could paint five canvases and dislike all five. His first studio in Bali was hot and “there was an energy inside this place that just made me not create great.” Once he showed a friend a painting he didn’t like, and the friend said it was his favourite. Now when a piece fails he leaves it for thirty days, sometimes two months, and comes back to it.

Over Christmas and into the new year he made Flowers, the largest painting he has done. Beforehand he studied a few abstract painters over and over, their paint, their strokes, their techniques. Then he went in without a plan. “It just had the mark making. It was just beautiful colors, the movement of me.” He called his mother afterwards. He is still trying to make something like it.

Flowers

When he isn’t painting, it is usually because the marketing work is heavy or something in his life has gone wrong. Then he checks the basics: the gym, meditation, walks, what he is eating. He prays most nights, to what he calls the divine universe. His rule for the studio is to turn up. “If it’s for 10 minutes, you’ve won the day.” 

A photographer offered him a cigarette recently and pushed when he said no. “Come on, man, you’re an artist, like, you should be smoking.” What he told the photographer is what he says about most things: “I don’t want to fit into someone’s box.” And, more plainly, “I don’t think I need to use a substance to create art.”

In the next twelve months he wants his first solo exhibition, and he is in talks. He has moved from acrylics to oils. “I know for a fact I will be a full-time artist.” He expects his style to change in two or three years. He also wants to go further into where the paintings come from, toward whatever might be blocking him, “it could be more sadness or a trauma or things like that.” Some of the work is already carrying it. “Subconsciously there is something there that I’m trying to get out that I just, I don’t know about.”

Wild Horse

Unheld

Holding Rythm

Written and published by Pauline Garcin.