Graves, Morris

Graves, Morris (1910–2001). American painter, born at Fox Valley, Oregon. Between 1928 and 1930 he worked as a seaman on mail ships to the Far East, bringing him into touch with Oriental art, which had a deep and lasting effect on his work and outlook. As a painter he was mainly self-taught, although he had some instruction from Mark Tobey (another artist inspired by Eastern culture), whom he met in about 1935. From 1932 to 1964 Graves lived in or near Seattle, then moved to Loleta in north-west California. His work has affinities with Surrealism as well as Oriental traditions, but it speaks a highly individual symbolic and formal language that has little in common with the work of his contemporaries. He painted mainly birds and small animals, with a keen eye for characteristic attitudes and poses, and a highly personal sense of fantasy reflecting an inner mystical world. In his American Art of the 20th Century (1973) Sam Hunter has written of him: ‘A deeply religious man … Graves has made a tender, lyrical poetry from such images as a pine tree tremulously holding a full moon in its branches, or tiny birds and snakes, images which seem to be secreted rather than painted on canvas or paper. His art is rapt, visionary, hypnotic.’ He worked for preference on Chinese or Japanese paper, finding ‘a delight in the fragility, the transiency of the material'. In the 1960s he turned also to abstraction in the form of three-dimensional constructions. Graves travelled widely, had numerous one-man exhibitions, and won several awards. His work is in many public collections, the largest representation being at the Morris Graves Archival Collection at the Museum of Art of the University of Oregon in Eugene.