This series of image-based posts focuses on the work of Deborah Attwood Morris, and most of the words are hers. Here we continue the conversation introduced with our August 4 post on her “house series.”
After the shift away from the house series, by way of Chaco Canyon, I started thinking about opposing views, opposites. My subject matter is about pain—and I was painting into and from the pull of making what is both beautiful and painful. This is what brought me to this next thing—incongruity—and this painting was one of the first paintings exploring that. I’m putting things side by side and asking why would you put these together?
At the same time I was drawing in the painting, for example with these white outlines that look something like rocks. I’m not sure what I was thinking. The left hand side was about disappearing, which got me started on some other paintings. I got hooked initially on the word ‘incongruity’ and started thinking about the surface structure and putting things together that don’t belong together and making a painting out of that.
They were really useful paintings.
Some examples of these paintings:
And a hint of directions to come—
About this time I started getting into the dot paintings.
“3 Planets 2011” is one of the early pieces working with dots. What I was concentrating on was color and shape, the integration of the two of them, not so much an outside subject—it really was about itself. But it still shows the two-part structure I was working with before. It has the element of the two conflicting aspects. I was still using that division, and it includes a three-dimensional half-sphere that’s painted.
Mapping is also involved here and mapping comes into the brain paintings that will come later. But I started to feel like I was going into space here, and I wasn’t totally sold on it.
I was always a little uncomfortable with the dot paintings, always feeling like I wasn’t where I wanted to be. I wasn’t convinced by them maybe, so somehow they were all transitional, even though I did a ton of them.
This one was called “My Son’s Brain.” Along with the dots and the concept, I was working with color, how to use color and how to use color in a way that I could integrate with little tiny spots.
There’s a linear structure to the painting and also a circle image, and the dots are layered so that some of them are pathways or connections trying to get to something else.
I was thinking about the way my son’s brain works—with ADD, which is something I have also, but I didn’t know this when I was growing up, so I was really affected by it, and it shaped a lot of my life.
I was really experimenting at this time, and went on experimenting further, pushing the dots and transparency. This is on a translucent mylar, and some of the others were also.
I’ve always liked this one. I had more confidence in it and I was being playful. The hand that shows up seems to come through the back of the painting, almost my hand doing the painting. This is one of the successful ones.
I was working on many similar things at the same time. There are so many like this, smaller in scale. I was just doing color. I went back to the basics. Color, the dot, how to make the flat plane become a world.
And the mapping is beginning to take form in this also, connecting one part to another part, having it break apart, having it be interrupted.
Here there was a continuation of the dot, and also working with repeating a line, over and over and changing the color of it, from the dot as repetition to circle and line as repetition.
In a sense these are all exercises, experiments, even the finished works. ‘Invitations’ is a good word for this process ... playing with the materials and elements. I wasn’t learning as fast as I was making them. I wasn’t trying to control them. So my learning what they actually were is still arriving.
A preview of what comes next in these conversations.
For an introduction to the work of Deborah Morris, please see our post of August 4.