Morris Graves - Career

Career

Although he attended high school in 1932 in Beaumont, Texas at the urging of his aunt, Graves returned to the Northwest before actually graduating and never got his high school diploma. He spent much of his professional life in Seattle and La Conner, Washington, sharing a studio for a while with Guy Anderson. Graves' early work was in oils and focused on birds touched with strangeness, either blind, or wounded, or immobilized in webs of light.

In the early 1930s, Graves studied Zen Buddhism. In 1934, Graves built a small studio on family property in Edmonds, Washington, that burned to the ground in 1935, and with it, almost all of his work. His first one-man exhibition was in 1936 in Seattle's Art Museum (SAM). In May 1937, he bought 20 acres (81,000 m2) on Fidalgo Island. In 1939, he began working on the WPA Federal Art Project, but only for a few months. It was there that he met Mark Tobey and became impressed with Tobey's calligraphic line. Later in the year, Graves went to the Virginia Islands and to Puerto Rico to paint.

In 1940, Graves began building a house, which he named The Rock, on his Fidalgo Island property, and befriended an architect, George Nakashima, who had recently visited Japan. He lived at The Rock with a succession of cats and dogs, all called Edith, in honor of poet Edith Sitwell.

In 1942, his paintings were part of the New York Museum of Modern Art's "Americas 1942" exhibit, bringing Graves national recognition.

In 1954, Graves staged the first Northwest art "Happening", sending invitations to everyone on the Seattle Art Museum mailing list:

"You or your friends are not invited to the exhibition of Bouquet and Marsh paintings by the 8 best painters in the Northwest to be held on the afternoon and evening of the longest day of the year, the first day of summer, June 21, at Morris Graves' palace in exclusive Woodway Park."

In September 1954, Life Magazine did an article on "The Mystic Painters of the Northwest," featuring Graves, and including Guy Anderson, Kenneth Callahan, and Mark Tobey; this changed his life.

His mid-career works were influenced by East Asian philosophy and mysticism, which he used it as a way of approaching nature directly, avoiding theory. Graves adopted certain elements of Chinese and Japanese art, including the use of thin paper and ink drawing. His painted birds, pine trees, and waves. Graves works, such as "Blind Bird" often contain elements of Mark Tobey, who was inspired by Asian calligraphy. Graves switched from oils to gouaches, his bird became psychedelic, mystic, en route to transcendence. The paintings were bold, applied in a thick impasto with a palette knife, sometimes on coarse feed sacks.

In the 1950s, Graves returned to oils, but also painted in watercolor and tempera. From 1954 through 1964, Graves lived in Ireland and sculpted.