Frame 61March 04, 2024

James Morse

Frame 61March 04, 2024

"The miraculous mystery of paint is that it is able to transmute all of what we know and feel through the streaky brushstroke of colorful mud."

Interview by Richard Starbuck

Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your background? Where did you study?

My father is a very good draftsman. Some of his mentor’s etchings hung in our house as I was growing up, and we have a few of my father’s etchings hanging in our house. Art making has always been encouraged by my parents, and I grew up making all sorts of things from drawings and paintings to large skateboard ramps and furniture. My grandfathers were both quite handy. My mother’s father built his own house, and I use many of his inherited hand tools today. So, it only seems natural that I have been busy making things nearly every day of my life since I was about seven years old.

This led me to an arts-focused high school in Chicago where we enjoyed 4 hours of studio art practice every day, and figure drawing sessions throughout the semester. It laid a good art foundation for me as a teenager, and kept me out of trouble. I still fold the corners of my canvases the way that I learned there. I then went to Los Angeles to study for a bachelor’s degree in graphic design at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. It was a great school, and I learned a lot during my time there, but I was enjoying a lot of freedom and maybe a few too many trips north to San Francisco or south into Mexico, and ended up losing the scholarship that made it possible for me to afford school.

My youthful foolishness collided with the hard realities of life, and I realized I would have to work harder in order to make anything of myself. I enrolled at a small liberal arts college on the shore of Lake Michigan and earned a philosophy degree. After working for a few years as a designer and photographer at a magazine in order to pay off my student debts, I decided to pursue a master of fine arts (MFA) in photography. I went to Columbia College in Chicago and had Dawoud Bey, Paul D’Amato, and Kelli Connell as professors. I learned a lot from them about building a life as a working artist, and chose to drop out of the program because it didn’t seem possible for me to ever pay back the student loan debts that I was rapidly incurring.

I put away my 4x5 camera, and worked as a graphic designer and photographer for ten years. I paid off my student debts, and then my wife and I saved every penny we could in order to build a house and start a family. Over the past ten years, I have built the house, raised two children, and have slowly transitioned from doing graphic design work for clients to furniture making, and finally on to painting. It seems I was the last person to realize that I have been an “artist” all along. Five years ago, when we were finally financially stable, and I felt confident enough to make the leap to being an “artist” all day every day, I told my parents that I had realized I was an artist and this was a decision that I had to make for reasons deep within my soul that I could not articulate. My mom and dad laughed, and my wife smiled. The three of them said that they had known I was an artist for more than twenty years, and I was genuinely surprised to hear this.

Steinbeck said something along the lines of, “If it is right, it happens — the main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.” It has taken me nearly 40 years to get here, to this way of being where I identify as an artist and spend nearly every weekday painting. All I’ve done is wake up every morning excited to make something as best I could, whatever it may have been — a skateboard ramp, commercial work for clients, a nice lunch or dinner, a well written email, a house, a chair, a painting. It doesn’t matter what it is. We are lucky to have hands, because we can link them to our mind and reach out into the world for materials and create just about anything imaginable. I have a lot of respect for art schools and everyone who graduates from them. My path has been more meandering, and that seems fairly common. There is no correct or best way to go about this thing. I have a note pinned to the wall in my studio that has been a helpful reminder to me. It reads, “We are what we do, not what we say we’ll do.”

Your exhibition 'The Hands That Comb The Hills' at the Cob Gallery. It's part of a unique dual series that pairs established and emerging artists. In your work, you've explored landscapes as spaces filled with cultural and personal stories. How do you see your paintings interacting with the works of Tom Bull and Sholto Blissett in this context?

It has been a privilege to show alongside Tom and Sholto at Cob. The way Cassie Beadle has curated the dual show is very interesting because of how tangibly you’re able to feel the vast differences between the way three artists have responded to and utilized the metaphor of landscape to express three totally different ideas. I am struck by Tom’s work especially because it cuts to the bone on issues around rural communities and substance abuse in a way that I never could have imagined and also would not have pursued because I am much more reserved. I do not have the guts to approach thorny subject matter in that way, with such sensitivity and respectfulness.

Cassie has managed to show the incredible depth and fruitfulness of landscape as metaphor, which is something humans have done for many thousands of years. It is amazing that land can, in a physical sense, remain fertile and bear fruit for generation after generation if it is respectfully and wisely cultivated through the years. It is even more astonishing that the metaphorical concept of the “landscape” can also remain fertile ground for artists and poets over the same incredible timespan. As a means of expression, the landscape is just as fertile today as it was tens of thousands of years ago when it was painted on the cave walls in Indonesia, France, and Spain. This recent body of work shows the potential for harmonious and mutually beneficial relationships between human society and the landscape by focusing on sustainable ways of interacting with the land that are viable solutions to today’s needs and have historical precedence as non-harmful human interaction with the landscape.

My wife and I have two young children, and much of our time is spent building and shaping the lens with which they view the world. This causes me to reach for hope, optimism, and love as tools with which to paint a potential way forward for them. It is possible for the next generation to live much more intimately with the land, to do better than we have done, to cooperate with the landscape rather than dominate it, and to step away from the technology-obsessed culture that is separating us from the ancient union that humans have historically had with the land. These paintings have tried to show scenarios where we are not antagonizing the landscape, but working as equal members of a diverse ecology, enhancing the opportunities for growth and fruitfulness in the landscape as much for the plants, insects, and animals of Earth as much as for ourselves.

An optimistic eye toward hope and love alone is not sufficient to deal effectively with the immense challenges that we face today. Cassie’s dual show enhances all of our work by using context to multiply its scope, making the whole much greater than the sum of its parts alone. This is one of the great possibilities of the curatorial practice, and I think Cob has done an excellent job.

Your choice to paint landscapes based on real-life studies, avoiding photographs, really stands out in 'The Hands That Comb The Hills.' This must bring a certain authenticity and depth to your work. Could you talk a bit about how this method shapes your creative process and the emotional impact of your art?

My preference to paint based on real-life studies instead of photographs is the result of where I live and how I was trained. From high school onwards, there has always been an instructor or two who have drummed into my mind the idea that it is always better to draw from life rather than from a photograph. This sentiment has stuck with me, and whenever possible, I draw or paint from life. Anyone who draws or paints from life can easily see if an artwork was made from life or photographs. The evidence is in the peculiar treatment of space that is registered by the eye and mind versus the rather sterile gaze of a camera’s lens. One is not better than the other, but there is a charming lack of comprehension and a beautiful streak of honesty in anything drawn from life.

I live immediately beside nature, so drawing and painting from life is easily accessible. We live in Northport, Michigan, and there are three houses visible from our house, which sits atop a hill. All the rest is hills and valleys, lakes and ponds, and forests and fields. Absent of cloud cover, the Milky Way is visible every night of the year. We are tied tightly to the raw naturalness of the landscape. This is a luxury that comes at a cost. For example, there is no food delivery of any kind available where we live. Most errands must be done 45 minutes drive from the house, and while we do have a grocery store here in our little village, the selection is quite limited and the quality fluctuates dramatically outside of the local growing season. These are not complaints, but trade-offs that we chose mindfully.

So it is easy for me to step out of the studio and look at the landscape. If there’s foul weather, I don’t even have to step outside because there is a different landscape out of the windows of every side of the house. This was not possible when I lived in city apartments in the past. But there were people everywhere in the city, so it was easy to search for gestures of figures that could be drawn from life in the city. Lately, there are more and more figures in my work, and many of them may have my physique because I have an ever-expanding photo album on my phone of images of me pulling on rope, swinging an axe, picking fruit from a tree, or involved in whatever gesture I require for a composition. Heaven forbid that anyone should ever discover this photo album, as I am often unshaven, wearing my filthy studio slippers, and showing ridiculous expressions on my face!

I think it is easier to imbue emotion and sensitivity into a painting of something that we know well. For example, we could paint our mothers or our favorite place to sit with much more emotion than we could paint a stranger or a random bus stop bench. The miraculous mystery of paint is that it is able to transmute all of what we know and feel through the streaky brushstroke of colorful mud. I have lived intimately with the landscape for the past ten years, swimming in its waters, walking its fields and climbing its hills. The water we drink is unfiltered from a well beneath these hills. At night the owl and coyote lull us to sleep. The wind tears at our faces, and the frequent fog smells beautifully of the cold freshwater that is all around our little peninsula. I can paint this landscape with my eyes closed because I know it well. I can walk its paths in my imagination even when far from home. Wyeth said, “You should paint what is yours because few know it as well as you.”

I try not to look at my telephone as much as I do, but of course, I am as addicted to it as everyone else. If I have the opportunity to leave my phone at home and go sit beside a tree to paint for a few hours, I will gladly do that rather than gather reference material from a Google image search.

*The Hands That Comb The Hills, 2024, Installation View, courtesy of Cob Gallery*

In your latest series, there's a noticeable nod to the style of Bruegel the Elder, particularly in how you portray village life and integrate human figures into the landscape. How do you balance these historical artistic influences with the contemporary themes, like environmental awareness and the impact of technology?

Indeed, there is certainly a Bruegel influence in these paintings. I have admired Bruegel since I was a child, and seeing Bruegel works in person always leaves a lasting memory. In addition to his paintings, “The Harvesters,” which hangs at the Met in New York, I was particularly awestruck nearly twenty years ago when I first visited the Kunsthistorisches Museum while living in Vienna. I frequently receive comments about the influence of Bruegel, and I think the similarities are mostly due to the number of figures present in the painting, their scale relative to the overall picture plane, and the rural setting and agricultural activities found throughout the compositions. Having admired Bruegel so greatly, I am always pleased to hear that something of his spirit lingers in this body of work.

It is common to see our friends and neighbors engaging in Bruegelian activities all around the pastoral and agricultural area in which we live. Quite literally throughout the seasons we will see and participate alongside our neighbors cutting hay and drinking homemade beer/cider in the shade of a tree; hunting in the snow with their bird dogs, riding horses, ice skating on inland lakes, and enjoying festive dance parties at the local taverns. To cite another influence on my work, Richard Scarry, when asking ourselves, “What Do People Do All Day?” the answer in this neck of the woods is that they work and play in and among the landscape, in much the same way that Bruegel’s friends and neighbors did during the middle of the 16th century.

Other influences on this body of work include the heavily populated wide field of view often painted by L.S. Lowry; the rural scenes of Horace Pippin; the gestural figure shape making of Jacob Lawrence; the dense agrarian compositions of Anna Mary Robertson Moses (Grandma Moses); The 19th century pastoralism of Paul Sérusier and Georges Lacombe; the many overlapping and somewhat abstracted figures of Édouard Vuillard; the jam-packed crowds of James Ensor’s “Christ’s Entry Into Brussels”; The thickly painted blocky figures that are full of action in Alfons Walde’s winter paintings; the incredible quantity of people in Leon Kossoff’s many “Children’s Swimming Pool” paintings; all the delightfully flat and dully colorful figures of Jockum Nordström; the illustrations of Lois Lenski (my favorite illustrator when I was a child); as well as so many of my contemporaries who are working with loosely painted and slightly abstract figurative subjects.

I like to present the figures at a small scale relative to the size of the picture plane in order to preserve a level of anonymity within them. I think that this, in addition to their lacking hardly any facial features, provides an opportunity for the viewer to inhabit any of the figures threaded throughout the composition, and this ability to enter the world and imagine doing the things that the figures are doing in tandem with the landscape is a feature of this work that I hope to further develop as I continue. I feel that I ought to further abstract the figures and the landscape in order to disintegrate a certain amount of the articulated narrative that is visibly available so that there is more work for the viewers' mind to do on their own — in a sense, making the paintings more playful and conducive to the imaginative construction of the viewer. It is conceivable that succeeding in doing so could potentially inspire a viewer to go out into the world and get their hands into the earth and the wind in their nose. Looking at these paintings as I worked on them in my studio always motivated me to go for a walk outside, even if only for five minutes. I always feel better after going for a walk.

Tell us a bit about how you spend your day / studio routine? What is your studio like?

In our house, we are fond of saying that, “Dinner is the only art you’re guaranteed to make every day,” and in our house, this is for the most part true. With two grade-school-aged children and their accompanying sports and activities, there is often a lot to juggle, so my schedule is always varying from week to week. My wife and I handle it pretty well together, so my duties are mostly grocery shopping and making breakfast and dinner, in addition to the all-hands-on-deck type of chores that all households share. Once the kids are off to school and my wife heads to her office, I make another cup of coffee and walk 40 feet across the courtyard to my studio.

I paint only in the natural light of the day, so the work tasks are somewhat weather dependent. On super bright sunny days I do things like stretch and gesso canvases, procure art materials, or tend to the correspondence that comes with any job. This is because it is too bright for me to be able to see color with much accuracy or sensitivity. Located beside Lake Michigan, we enjoy many bright but overcast days when the light is beautifully diffuse, and I always paint on these days because the studio becomes illuminated with an almost magical very clean neutral white light. Because of this strong preference, I paint in the studio a lot between October and April, and much less between May and September.

The studio is surrounded by forest on two sides, so during the summer, which I call “green season,” I don’t do much painting due to the strong influence of green light that bounces into the studio off of all the trees. This works out alright because I turn my attention to drawing, printmaking, furniture making, gardening, and taking care of the kids who are out of school during the summer. If it is stormy or if there is some effect upon the landscape from a strong wind or foggy air, I will grab my little field kit and find somewhere to paint one or two paintings outside. If it is raining I like to draw with those soft aqueous graphite pencils and let the rainwater do plenty of smudging. If the wind is right, I like to paint in my canoe on several of the inland lakes in the county. My wife says I better not end up like Tom Thomson. Secretly, I think that’d make for a pretty good poem on my headstone.

My studio is like many others in that it has simple pine plank floors and large white walls with loads of notes and books laying around all over the place. I often listen to music, preferring instrumental pieces over anything with lyrics, and I try to keep a pretty regular schedule as if I were punching in at a factory. I fire up the engines at 8:30 am, coffee break at 10, quick lunch at noon, cup of builder’s tea at 3 pm, and start cleaning my palette around 4:30. Aim to be back in the house by 5 pm. Clean my brushes and start making dinner. Eat all together as a family around 6 pm. If I get stuck or if it’s particularly beautiful outside, I’ll go for a little walk up the hill behind the studio whenever the opportunity arises. I’ll confess to a fair bit of bird watching and daydreaming from the studio windows. If smoking wouldn’t kill you, I’d definitely partake. If I’m nervous about messing up a painting, but know that something must change, I keep a bottle of Lagavulin in the studio for a bit of liquid courage. If I smell like peat and am sporting a grin, you can tell that it’s worked yet again.

Lois Dodd and Frank Auerbach have been major influences on my practice. It is their dedication and commitment to the work ethic of painting that impresses me most. I will be satisfied if I can paint even just half as many years as they have in their long and fruitful careers. Hopefully, there is something about surrendering your mind over to the practice of painting that helps you live well into your nineties.

What artwork have you seen recently that has resonated with you?

I’ve been thinking about Alice Neel’s, “Spanish Party” (1939) since seeing it a few years ago when David Zwirner showed some of her early work. It shows a bunch of young families dancing at a house party while the young kids lay sleeping on couches and in the crib that’s jammed in the corner. It appears to be a weekend gathering, a chance to put on a nice outfit that makes you feel beautiful and to hang with your friends. There doesn’t seem to be a care in the world, and no one’s upset that it’s getting past bedtime. Friends play gentle music while seated on the windowsill, and the gloriously messy always-more-complex-than-it-appears-on-the-surface narratives of human life play out as they have for all of human existence. It is a tremendously honest painting. It achieves what Ms. Neel set out to do when she stated, “I have painted life itself right off the vine.” To me, it is among the most human of all the paintings in the world, and I adore it for this reason.

We were recently in Stockholm, and there was a show of Swedish painting from 1910–1945 at the Moderna Museet. Of the many excellent works that were all new to my eyes, one small painting in particular struck me. Bror Hjorth’s “Kappsläden” (The Racing Sleigh) from 1922 seemed as if it were painted in about twelve minutes. It possesses such immediacy that it almost has the effect of a photograph in its ability to capture and preserve a moment in time. The paint is laid on a mostly white background with a deftness that is so fresh it’s like a bowl of berries picked this morning with a dollop of just-whipped cream from a cow that’s still standing in the yard. This kind of bottled human truth, a snapshot of the mind with its peculiarly distorted perspective, crude shapes, and child-like color throttles my imagination and causes great joy to spring from within me. I’m not entirely sure why, but it’s like remembering something wonderful. These two works reflect a profound humanness that I hope to one day achieve in my work.

Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?

I am assembling a book that collects my work of the past five years. I mostly wish to create this book so that I can look back over all that I’ve made and see more clearly the course that I’m on. It may also help me remember these cherished days while the kids are young once I am creakily painting away in my nineties like Frank and Lois. This week I’ve been preparing a few large canvases on which I’ll paint a fishing village that is just down the road. I used to visit it when I was a boy, and there is a large driftwood weather vane carved to look like a lake sturgeon. It is still up there in the wind, and this unruly fish has appeared in my dreams from time to time over the years. I also have been sketching out plans for a small clinker-built wooden rowboat upon whose hull I intend to paint a variety of ferocious leviathans. Other than that, we are thinking about spring and our garden, and we are looking forward to the vernal equinox with its lengthening of the daylight hours.

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All images courtesy of the artist and Cob Gallery
Interview publish date: 04/03/2024

Frame 61