Search results for ""Author Lawrence Fong""

Morris Graves is a major American painter with roots in the Pacific Northwest. Morris Graves: Selected Letters draws on a vast cache of the his unpublished correspondence, dating from his teenage years until his death in 2001. Few visual artists of any era have left such a rich and wide-ranging collections of letters, which makes this body of work an unusual and valuable document in American art. The Graves correspondence is remarkable for its scope, variety, and depth. Written to many correspondents over long periods of time, the letters include the artist's reflections on his art, the art world, philosophy (Zen Buddhism and Vedanta in particular), architecture (Graves designed his homes and gardens), and relationships with family, friends, and lovers. Graves himself preserved most of the letters, or copies of them, and put no restrictions on their use. Other letters come from a wide range of private and institutional sources. Among the correspondents are Graves's family; Marian Willard, his art dealer; Richard Svare, his companion in the 1950s; and Nancy Wilson Ross, novelist and Buddhist scholar. Other notable figures with whom Graves corresponded are poet Carolyn Kizer, art critic Theodore Wolff, curator Peter Selz, choreographer Merce Cunningham (for whom Graves created a set design), and painter Mark Tobey. Recurrent themes in the Graves letters are the tensions between sociability and solitude; the desire to be free of the material world versus the need for material comfort; the dismissal of commerce and the desperate need for money; the pleasures and pitfalls of love; and the difficulties of the creative life. The letters are organized topically under the broad categories of people (family, friends, intimates), places (homes and travels), and art (finances and philosophy).

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Artist Frank Okada played a significant role in the modern art history of the Pacific Northwest. Born a Nisei in 1931, he was raised in Seattle’s International District and throughout his life retained its influences and his vivid memories in his art. From his first painting award -- received at the Washington State fair -- until his death in 2000, he worked at the confluence of regional art, Asian culture, and national art movements. At the beginning of his career, Okada received a series of prominent fellowships -- John Hay Whitney in 1957, Fulbright in 1959, and Guggenheim in 1966–67. He was greatly influenced by the artists he met and was a close observer of the art scenes in New York, Paris, and Kyoto in an effort to find his own style of painting. He began teaching painting at the University of Oregon in 1969, a tenure that lasted almost thirty years. His work from the seventies, eighties, and nineties balanced forms and colors in intensely worked surfaces. The color blocks gradually became more intellectually structured and his compositions more expressive as he made his colors more powerful. As Nakane notes, “without recognizable reference to nature or his own personality, he created a texture that brought light to a field of color. . . . In order to appreciate his paintings, one needs to spend time observing how the colors respond to the changes of light throughout the day.”

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