Morris Graves

THE ART OF Morris Graves was an outflowing of religious experience. He had been profoundly moved by the spirituality of the Far East and is steeped in Vedanta and Zen Buddhism. His art had acquired something of the contemplative depth of these religious sources. He had also been deeply affected by the grandeur of the northwest landscape, its wild coast and rocky islands, the great forests and the plants and creatures living there. The art of the Indians, too, and the life of Japan glimpsed in early trips he made as a seaman had much to do with forming his thought.

Graves was born in 1910 in Fox Valley, Oregon, an old lake bed high in the mountains where his parents, Seattle people, spent a short time homesteading. The family returned to Seattle and later lived in a town to the north on Puget Sound. At eighteen Graves left school to ship with the American Mail Line out of Seattle, and made three trips to the Orient.

During the depression years he shared a restless, hand-to-mouth existence with other young artists in Seattle, painting, traveling about trying to sell their work, helped by a few interested people. In 1933 he won a prize at the Seattle Art Museum and in 1936 had a one-man show there. At this time he joined the WPA Federal Art Project, which gave him intermittent support until 1939. His paintings were somber oils of birds, animals, landscape and still life charged with symbolism; but before he left the Project he had been deeply influenced by Mark Tobey, who had lived in the Orient, studied the Chinese brush and developed his calligraphic "white writing." About 1937, Graves turned from oil painting to tempera and wax, ink and gouache on thin papers, finding a means of expression in harmony with his thought. In the four years following, he produced the remarkable series of paintings that brought him immediate recognition in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1942.

The solitude so necessary to him at this time he sought and found at "The Rock," a high remote spot on Fidalgo Island in Puget Sound. Here he built a shelter in which he lived and worked for years. In 1946 he won a Guggenheim fellowship to work in Japan, but, denied an entrance permit, he stayed in Honolulu painting under the inspiration of the Academy's Oriental collections.

In 1947 he moved away from The Rock and began to design and build a great house in a wood near Edmonds. The next year he went to England on a private commission which fell through; he spent the winter at Chartres painting the cathedral, a series he later destroyed. The Edmonds house, an extraordinary project which seemed to answer the need for a new form, a new discipline, was completed in 1954. Exhausted by its magnitude, Graves went to Japan for several months, then to Ireland where he had worked.

Graves: Painting is an experience which is often resisted and is still predominantly a mixture of anxiety and despair. Painting is still the experience of trying to resolve existence--resolve the moment, the day, the year. To the feelings of anxiety and despair is always added a kind of awful delight, a kind of bliss, also a not-caring and a caring simultaneously in an obsessive way, also a sadness and a sense of futility--futility because the experience does not endure, is not final, but must always ebb and be re-experienced . . .

I wish I could say something clear about painting, and something about painting better than one knows-it using you rather than you it. Also something about the disheartening discrepancy between the vision and the painting--the transferring with paint--the difficult and limited and often impossible medium of paint. That is part of the reason that painting is "resisted"--and too, the ego being so involved when the painting is a failure. To collect one's forces and set them in motion, which so often results in falling far short, is complexly painful, full of desperate and anxious feelings . . . .

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