Morris Graves

Morris Cole Graves (August 28, 1910 – May 5, 2001) was an American painter.

He was one of the earliest Modern artists from the Pacific Northwest to achieve national and international acclaim.

His style, referred to by some reviewers as Mysticism, used the muted tones of the Northwest environment, Asian aesthetics and philosophy, and a personal iconography of birds, flowers, chalices, and other images to explore the nature of consciousness.

Morris Cole Graves was born August 28, 1910, in Fox Valley, Oregon, where his family had moved about a year before his birth, from Seattle, Washington, in order to claim land under the Homestead Act.

He was named in honor of Morris Cole, a favored minister of his Methodist parents.

He had five older brothers, and eventually, two younger siblings.

Constant winds and cold winters made it much more difficult than expected to establish a working farm, and the struggle led to bankruptcy of the senior Graves' once-thriving paint and wallpaper store in Seattle.

In 1911, a few months after Morris' birth, the family returned to the Seattle area,

settling north of the city in semi-rural Edmonds, Washington.

He was a self-taught artist with natural understandings of color and line.

Graves dropped out of high school after his sophomore year, and between 1928 and 31, along with his brother Russell, visited all the major Asian ports of call as a steamship hand for the American Mail Line.

On arriving in Japan, he wrote:

"There, I at once had the feeling that this was the right way to do everything. It was the acceptance of nature not the resistance to it. I had no sense that I was to be a painter, but I breathed a different air."

Graves began his lifelong study of Zen Buddhism in the early 1930s.

In his early twenties, Graves finished high school in 1932 in Beaumont, Texas, while living with his maternal aunt and uncle.

He then returned to Seattle, and received his first recognition as an artist when his painting Moor Swan (1933) won an award in the Seattle Art Museum's Northwest Annual Exhibition and was purchased by the museum.

He split his time between Seattle and La Conner, Washington, where he shared a studio 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 1934, he built a small studio on family property in Edmonds, Washington.

When it burned to the ground in 1935, almost all of his work to date was lost with it.

His first one-man exhibition was in 1936 at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM); that same year he began working under Bruce Inverarity at the Seattle unit of the WPA's Federal Art Project.

His participation was sporadic, but it was there that he met Mark Tobey and became impressed with Tobey's calligraphic line.

In January 1937 Graves traveled to New York City to study with the controversial Father Divine's International Peace Mission movement in Harlem; on his return, in May, he bought 20 acre on Fidalgo Island.

In 1938 he quit the FAP and went to the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico to paint.

In 1940, Graves began building a house, which he named The Rock, on an isolated promontory on his Fidalgo Island property.

He lived at The Rock with a succession of cats and dogs, all called Edith, in honor of poet Edith Sitwell.

Graves was known for his personal charm and bursts of puckish humor, but also spent long periods in semi-isolation, absorbed in nature and his art.

At the Rock, with the Second World War erupting, he retreated for a particularly long time and created a very large number of paintings.

Many of them, such as Dove of the Inner Eye (1941) and Bird in the Night (1943), featured what would become Graves' iconic motif of birds trapped in layers of webbing or barbs, representing the artist's fears for the survival of man and nature in the face of modern industry and warfare.

His near-isolation was interrupted in the spring of 1942 when the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened its Americans 1942: 18 Artists from 9 States exhibition.

Critics raved over Graves' contributions, all of which were quickly snapped up by museums and collectors.

At the same time the U.S. Army came looking for him, as he had failed to achieve the conscientious objector status he had applied for.

There was also suspicion of him due to his association with the International Peace Mission and the fact that among his few regular visitors at the Rock had been the brilliant Japanese-American designer George Nakashima and his Japanese-born wife Miriam, prior to their being sent to the Minidoka relocation center.

While his work was receiving further exhibition in New York and Washington D.C., and phenomenal sales, the artist himself spent much of that same time in the stockade at Camp Roberts, California, where he went into a deep depression.

He was finally released from military service in March 1943.

With help from longtime supporters Elizabeth Willis, Nancy Ross, and Marian Willard, owner of the Willard Gallery in New York, Graves' work continued to enjoy popularity throughout the war years and beyond, with numerous exhibitions.

In the late 40s he purchased land in Woodway, Washington, and began construction of a unique cinderblock house he came to call "Careladen".

Graves received a Guggehheim Fellowship allowing him to study in Japan, but only made it as far as Hawaii before his entry was blocked by Japan's U.S. military occupation authorities.

An article in a 1953 issue of Life magazine cemented Graves' reputation as a major figure of the 'Northwest School' of artists.

He lived and worked mostly in Western Washington, but spent considerable time traveling and living in Europe and Asia, and spent the last several years of his life in Loleta, California.