An artist who was departing from Karpian Photo-Realism was Malcolm Morley. Since writing about Morley's Photo-Realist family portrait in 1968, Alloway had been able to observe some of the artist's development at first hand because he also taught at Stony Brook. Alloway, as director of the university gallery, had invited Morley to work there on a painting in public, and he had written about this in an exhibition leaflet in 1972. He also wrote about him in The Nation, describing how Morley had rejected the “neat, clean, and careful… compulsive still-life exercises” that comprise Photo-Realism's “simple form,” resulting in his leaving the O. K. Harris Gallery without having had a show there. When reproduced, his paintings appeared photographically realist but, “In the original… it was clear that a concentrated act of translation had forced and cajoled the paint into sensuous and compact correspondences with the photograph.” Alloway thought that, since 1965, Morley, had been “aware, as never before in the new work, of the arbitrary nature of such translations. Essential to the transformation now is the visible track of the process of painting, that part of the art that has been jettisoned by his neat followers.” Process was complemented by subject matter: Morley, “though miles from being a narrative painter or social commentator, has a persistent taste for evocative iconography,” now drawn from postcards and calendars. Morley had admitted an influence of Corot's use of light, and Alloway underlined that “It is this sense of condensed art history and of the physical operations of painting that is missing in most of the ‘still life’ copiers.” Even when he was incorporating objects to make small environments in the mid-1970s, and thus investigating “problems about art” and, in particular, exploring “representations as a subject” and the “iconography of simulacra,” Alloway thought of Morley as “every inch a painter”: whatever else he included in a work, his paint was lovingly applied—“dense, feisty, ripe, robust, souped-up, and expressionistic.”

Realism was not just a post-Pop development, but a whole range of possibilities.