By ROBIN CAUDELL
Staff Writer
August 23, 2007 04:00 am
—
KEENE VALLEY "" Marjorie Morrow's brilliant, kinetic paintings are
landscape EKGs.
Through her internal filter, she explodes the ever-changing pulse outside her Catskill studio retreat in works such as "Kissing Clouds" on exhibit at the Corscaden Barn in Keene Valley.
"I had done some a little bit smaller but I wanted to get bigger," Morrow said. "This group, a lot of them are studies of winter limbs. I always love the summer but now that I have gotten older, I love looking at the winter landscape because you see what is really there. It becomes this linear thing."
Summer's big green masses camouflage the vertical and horizontal angles of Morrow's subjects.
"I was telling someone once, I like to look for a long time and absorb the view or the site that I'm working from. I really try to execute it with some type of spontaneity, so I'm not sitting there and working slowly. I like to get that energy in it."
Her arm gets tired. Sometimes, it's falling off. The cliche "" it took 20 minutes plus 20 years "" is applicable.
"It's my interpretation of what I'm seeing there. Of course, that's the point. I feel like I'm conducting. My arm is moving through the air. It touches the canvas or paper. I have a wonderful view outside my studio."
She likens her vista to Monet's water lilies.
"It always changes "¦ the light or the weather or the way clouds move across the sky. Kissing Clouds,' it's strange but instantaneous. I try to capture a moment I'm looking at. I've gone and painted snow at night."
After 25 years in New York City without a place to go, outside is great now. Morrow was born in Newark, Ohio. Her paternal grandmother, Ruth Pence Morrow, graduated with a fine arts degree in 1915 from Dennison University in Ohio. She was a contemporary of Georgia O'Keeffe.
"Back then, very few women became artists. It wasn't like it is now. She always encouraged me to draw. Her creativity came in her life, everything she did "" baking, her flowers."
Morrow graduated from Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, where she majored in painting and print making. At Kent State University, she attended the Blossom-Kent Art Program under the guidance of Richard Anuszkiewicz.
Though some works are exclusively pastel, her mixed-media paintings are acrylic, charcoal and pastel. She works on flat, unstretched canvasses. Framed under glass, it throws people.
"I like getting into that canvas and digging around. It's a little bit stronger than paper. I can literally take them into the field. I like to make really strong marks. You do that to paper, you rip it."
This technique recalls her print-making aesthetics.
"I love etching. It has that feeling of working on a plate and incising lines."
She also loves color and adding collage bits, feed-store burlap or wallpaper, to her paintings to create an interior exterior ambience.
"Garlic Patch" is an example of how Morrow's fluid renderings amplify specific hues.
"It was winter, and there was a little spot of yellow-gold ochre where a garlic patch was in the summer," she said. "I took off on that and built color around that, so again, there's an internal thing coming out, too."
rcaudell@pressrepublican.com
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