Michael Morgan RI is recognised as one of the country’s most innovative and popular painters in watercolour and his works are held in public and private collections worldwide. All his exhibitions result in sell-out shows and two previous books Michael Morgan RI and 80@80 have sold in their thousands.

The impetus behind publishing this book was the artist’s discovery of a number of ‘lost’ paintings, or rather long-forgotten boxes of slides and photographs of his early works that provide a visual starting point on a journey across several decades.

The book’s title ‘The Road Less Travelled’ embodies the journey taken by Michael and reflects on the leitmotiv of many of his paintings: the pathway that leads us into the picture, and into the artist’s imaginings. This road is not merely a compositional device, it is an augury which draws from us a sense of journeying, an impulse to follow the path into the unknown, a desire for learning and discovery.

As the art critic Andrew Hoellering puts it: ‘For Morgan there are no certainties, only mysteries, and unknowingly we are immersed in the starkest beauty; a proposition so self-evident that it is everywhere understated in his work. What the viewer is witnessing is the familiar, but in a changed guise. We know, yet we do not know, this terrain. It is both real and imagined.’

Here, through its introductory essay and the inclusion of over 150 paintings and sketches, many of them never before published, the reader is invited to explore and interpret these imagined landscapes, better to appreciate the artist and his work.

Widely recognised as someone who has taken his chosen medium a step beyond where many of his contemporaries have feared to tread, The Road Less Travelled provides the reader with a fascinating study of the artist’s aspirations, his influences, and the challenges he has faced on his extraordinary journey.

Michael Morgan is a member of the prestigious Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours and a founding Academician of the South West Academy of Fine and Applied Arts. He holds the Royal Institute’s Medal for his outstanding work and was additionally awarded their Rowland Hilder Landscape prize in 2001. He has based his approach to picture making on Goethe’s simple advice that the art of painting is to see beyond the everyday familiar vision of things. This he has done with astonishing success.

Michael shows annually at the RI in London and at the South West Academy in Exeter. He is represented by Marine House at Beer and every one of his solo exhibitions, held there since 1998, has been a sell out; a remarkable feat by any standards. His work is in private collections internationally.

Imprint: Halstar. ISBN 978 1 906690 38 0, hardback, 260x270mm, 176 pages. Published March 2013.