ART REVIEW : ‘Sky of the Mind’: Dark Profundity of Morris Graves

SANTA BARBARA —  In almost any company, Morris Graves’ painting shrinks into the dark. His intensely personal, contemplative work is the antithesis of the “action painting” turned out by his contemporaries, the Abstract Expressionists.

Seen in the broader perspective of modern art history, usually characterized as a parade of bold moves, Graves’ archetypal images of blind birds and nocturnal beasts are a pacific aberration. He’s an Oriental thinker amid Occidental doers, an inspired wallflower at the prom.

A current exhibition at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art reinforces this view of one of the most revered artists ever to work in the Pacific Northwest. “Sky of the Mind: Morris Graves 1937-1987” (to Feb. 12) seems oddly out of sync with a sampling of modernist works from the museum’s collection and a vigorous array of recently made sculpture in “Figurative Impulses,” organized by Nancy Doll, the museum’s new curator of 20th-Century art. Both of those shows loudly proclaim their Zeitgeist while Graves’ paintings reverberate from the deep.

Familiar as they may be, there’s something profoundly strange about many of Graves’ images, and that is part of their power.

What are we to make of this congregation of coiled snakes, burrowing rodents and slithering eels? What of the recurring talons that sprout from the base of a dragon-headed snake, appear as a great gray heron’s oversize feet or simply emerge in the dark, along with a hand that grows into a human foot? A “Joyous Young Pine” that raises its branches to the heavens and basks in a rosy glow? Ocean waves that fly through the air and wrap themselves around a vase?

Graves may rail against modern incursions against nature, as in “Machine Age Noise No. 2,” which depicts two bolts of angry noise hurtling through space, but he is more than an environmentalist. He may accurately portray three Canada jays eating an avocado, but he isn’t a latter-day Audubon. Even without titles such as “Spirit Bird” or images of mandalas and “Tantra Yantras,” it is clear that Graves is concerned with a spiritual presence and mystical states of being. His is an art of heightened sensitivity honed on Zen Buddhism and Vedanta philosophies.

Born in 1910 in Fox Valley, Ore., Graves worked in the Far East as a seaman on mail ships before becoming a painter, and his youthful travels to Japan and elsewhere had a lasting effect on his art. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to study in Japan in 1946 but was not allowed to enter the country during the occupation. Working mainly in Seattle, he returned to Japan in 1963 and traveled throughout the Far East from 1971 to 1973.

Graves translated these experiences into Oriental motifs and objects, such as dragons and bronzes, and into styles that emulate calligraphy, scrolls or painted screens. Essentially self-taught, he also assimilated Surrealism (a 1944 “Landscape” contains vestiges of Miro) and studied briefly with Mark Tobey, a prominent Northwest artist whose automatic “white writing” appears in some of Graves’ early work. Early on, Graves painted with oil, but he is primarily known for working in the more ephemeral media of tempera, gouache, ink and watercolor.

Despite these influences, Graves developed an individual visionary style. As we see in about 50 works in the Santa Barbara exhibition (organized by the Schmidt Bingham Gallery in New York), his subjects run from spooky animals and ritualistic circles to vases of wispy flowers and an expansive armchair.

There’s a fairly sharp and surprising change of mood from one gallery to another here--the first housing the dark, bewitching works of the ‘40s and ‘50s, the second offering more colorful, prosaic images of the ‘70s. But the sense of ambiguous space and inner direction throughout the show is vintage Graves.

His flowers, like his animals, suggest the fragility of living things and the natural cycles of life. Often painted in nursery boxes or portrayed as “Winter Bouquets,” the blooms are in transit, and they seem nearly as vulnerable as the hawks and owls that emerge from dark backgrounds of early works. While the later paintings lack Graves’ characteristic mystical charge, they hint at nocturnal mysteries and speak of energies that are felt rather than seen.

Now that the spiritual strains of modern art are being examined in galleries and museums, and now that the Pacific Rim is acknowledged as a source of aesthetic riches, Graves is probably a prime candidate for enshrinement. That makes an essentially timeless art seem timely, but Graves is one of the art world’s private poets who neither profit nor perish in the limelight. Their strength depends on not fitting in.