D. (26 November 1926 – 4 January 2004) was a Canadian artist and member of the Regina Five, having also participated in the Emma Lake workshops.
Morton was born in Winnipeg and after a short stint in the Canadian Army[1] went to the Winnipeg School of Art (1946); the University of Southern California, Los Angeles (1947–1948), the Académie Julian; École des Beaux-Arts; Studio André Lhote, Paris (1949), the Camberwell School of Art and Studio of Martin Bloch in London, England (1950–1951); and also with the Emma Lake Artists' Workshops (1957–1965) with artists and critics such as Will Barnett (1967), Barnett Newman (1959), John Ferren (1960), Herman Cherry (1961), Clement Greenberg (1962), Kenneth Noland (1963), and Lawrence Alloway (1985).
[2] After working as a commercial artist in 1946, Morton became curator of the Calgary Allied Arts Centre (1951–1953), then was vice-president and manager of MacKay-Morton Ltd in Regina (1954–1967), his family business, an industrial pipe distributor.
[2][3] In 1961, his work was included in a National Gallery of Canada exhibition entitled Five Painters from Regina.
His colleague, Ron Bloore, said of his work: Morton's bold imagery is difficult to place within a Canadian visual art milieu because his roots seem to be in the apparently contradictory sources of pre-war French Purism and German Expressionism...Morton's vision is non-representational.