Return to Nature

"A new growth to watch is the abstract expression which derives rather heavily from nature." In so saying, Painter Carl Morris, 44, speaks with personal knowledge. His own nature-influenced abstractions rate one-man shows up and down the West Coast, and hang in nine U.S. museums. San Francisco Art Critic Alfred Frankenstein calls Morris "the best painter in Portland, Ore., and one of the best in the United States. Like some of his colleagues, Morris seems to be returning to nature with the very free technique of nonobjective painting." In Morris' one-man exhibit at Manhattan's Kraushaar

Gallery last week, the evidence was clear that Painter Morris has pushed his technique to a new combination of recognizable objects and abstract design.

Morris is the first to admit that much of his inspiration comes from Pacific Coast landscape. To find it, he need go no farther than the front door of his cliffside house, where he lives with his wife, Sculptress Hilda Morris, and ten-year-old son David. "Frequently fog makes islands of trees, very Oriental. This dissolves into misty atmosphere and double horizons. There's a vertical and horizontal thing going on, with the trees making the verticals." But Morris punctures the critics who have made a cult of the North west's Orient-influenced mysticism: "I guess I've got a mysticism that isn't mystic. If it looks Oriental, it is because of similar environments. Remember, in the Orient nature was always the teacher."

The big element Morris has learned from nature is the importance of space. Says he: "In the Northwest, you see either close up or far away." In From the Waterfront (see cut), done in soft shades of grey with only small punctuations of color, the painting close up has the tactile sense of smoothed concrete; seen from a distance, it becomes a moody study in perspective.

Morris draws a sharp line between his own abstractions, with recognizable objects looming out of the background, and the prevailing trend of Manhattan's abstract painters. To Morris, their delight in overall painted surfaces "is like looking into a window loaded with fascinating, kaleidoscopic objects. But in multiplying one area of excitement until it moves right off the canvas, they're not painting abstractions; they're just repeating details."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.