WHAT TO WATCH

Sky Documentaries, 7.15pm

MASTER OF LIGHT

“I am not what has happened to me,” insists the 39-year-old American painter George Anthony Morton, whose refined paintings in the style of the Dutch old masters belie his traumatic upbringing in Kansas

City and incarceration in a US penitentiary for 11 years on a drugs charge. Fatefully, that prison sentence saved him, giving him the space and time that he needed to nurture a serious talent for painting and portraiture.

In this HBO documentary, director Rosa Ruth Boesten plays with expectations, and with light and shade, as she follows Morton over four years while he undertakes a return journey to Kansas to reconnect with the family who, he claims, betrayed him (“Mama set me up to go to prison instead of her”). He also embarks on a grand tour of some of the great museums and art spaces of Europe on a quest to trace African and African-American influences on the whitemale dominated realist tradition of pre-20thcentury European art that his own style is primarily influenced by (and Rembrandt in particular). It’s an absorbing mix of high art, social documentary and intense biography, about an individual for whom art really is life. Gerard O’ Donovan