Born on August 28, 1910, in Fox Valley, Oregon, Morris Cole Graves denies classification. His stylistic influences are numerous, and his spiritual ones are vast. In 1942 he experienced “overnight success” when thirty of his works were included in the Museum of Modern Art, New York’s exhibition “Americans 1942: 18 Artists from 9 States,” what appears to have been an immediate sprint to the top of the art world, is actually reflective of years of hard work.

Graves spent his life struggling between introversion and extroversion. He was a practitioner of Zen Buddhism, and his reclusiveness was ideal for his meditation. He dropped out of high school after his sophomore year, and joined a mail ship that made trips to Japan and China between the years of 1928 and 1930. These visits had profound influence on his life and artwork. In his early twenties he moved to Beaumont, Texas where he lived with an Aunt while he completed high school, and took the first of a handful of art classes in his largely self-taught career. After graduation, he worked for the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Arts Project during the depression. In 1936 the Seattle Art Museum put on his first solo show, where visiting New York gallerist Marian Willard Johnson and MoMA curator, Dorothy C. Miller saw his works. It was between the years of 1936 and 1942 that Graves’s career changed course. In 1937 he met avant-garde composer John Cage, who shared many of the same beliefs based in Asian religion that Graves had. Cage would continue to be one of Graves’s close friends, in a largely reclusive life. It was this same year that he stopped working in oil paint, his early works display thick brushwork similar to that of the abstract expressionists, which is exactly why he abandoned the medium. He picked up tempera, gouache and watercolor, which allowed for softer, more subdued hues, and also allowed for a clearer line of Asian influence to be seen. In 1940 Graves painted Blind Bird, and in 1942 he produced Little Known Bird of the Inner Eye, two of his best known works. These two works exemplify his artistic aims, surrealist in philosophy (though he denied being a Surrealist), he sought to capture the spirit of the animal, as well as pull something from his own subconscious and project it onto the art. In 1942 he was included in the MoMA exhibition “Americans 1942: 18 Artists from 9 States,” and also had his first solo show on the east coast, at the Willard Gallery. In 1946 he won a Guggenheim fellowship. He chose to study abroad in Japan, but U.S. military would not allow him to do so. He settled on Hawaii, where he studied Asian art at the Honolulu Academy of Art. The following year, he left his Washington home, which he fondly referred to as “The Rock,” to move to Dublin, Ireland for a brief period of time.  In 1954 Life Magazine wrote an article titled, “The Mystic Painters of the Northwest,” which featured fellow artists Mark Tobey (who was a close friend and whose “white writing” heavily influenced Graves’s work), Kenneth Callahan and Guy Anderson. The article solidified Graves’s national reputation. A decade later Graves moved to Loleta, California where he bought twenty-five acres of land, upon which he built several Japanese-inspired buildings. He dubbed this residence “The Lake;” today it serves as a the Morris Graves Foundation, a retreat for artists. Around this time Graves’s focus shifted from his long-time subject of birds, to still lifes of flowers. Graves was the first American to receive the Windsor Award for Artists, given by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. He bonded with the Duchess over their mutual love of gardening, and even spent a Thanksgiving with their family. Graves has had dozens of solo exhibitions, and retrospectives throughout his life and after. Most notably he had retrospectives at The Whitney, New York in 1956 and The Phillips Collection, D.C., 1984. Morris Graves died on May 5, 2001 in Loleta, California. He is the artistic pride of the Northwestern United States, with his own museum in Eureka, California.