Jim Morphesis Essay
#3 Margaret Lazzari (Visiting Painting)
#4 Jim Morphesis (Response Painting)
The summer had just begun. I was in a new studio and still setting up my work area, when the painting that I was to work from arrived. I thought that creating an artwork for this project would be a good way to christen my new studio space. It was not until I had this mystery artist’s work hanging, with stark presence, on one of my pristine white walls did I feel the weight of the project’s title. In taking time to really look at this painting, a beautifully rendered work, I began to feel the need to find something quite specific. I wanted to come across an element in this painting that I could feel, with confidence, this artist wanted me to discover. Like most artists, I seek out and take inspiration from the work of artists that I know relate to my sensibilities and work process. Creating a relationship with this anonymous work would require some long discussions before beginning to paint my contribution to this project.
So much changes for the better once you start working. The visiting painting was a lyrical abstraction. Subtle representational elements, entering from the top of the picture plane suggested that something else was going on. I began to feel as though I was looking at the ghost of a destroyed organic structure. On the other hand, there is a point when, what appears to be a dissolving universe could, as well, be one taking form. I saw this uncertainty as a strength that I could relate to in this enigmatic work.
The question as to whether an image is falling into decay or emerging from it, is a concept that I deal with in my own work. I often bury figurative images in surfaces thick with paint, dry pigments and collage. In excavating these images and working with the new discoveries, I strive to move the work toward abstraction and something less defined and more inclusive. In my completed painting, an image of a human skull is both emerging and sinking into a crusty surface. The skull is a memento mori that I have used many times. In this painting, however, the use of the skull image was encouraged by passages in the artwork that I had been studying. In this work, I had come to see soft sienna shapes as once bone hard and now morphing into something else. Did I decide that this work must have something to do with the state of flux in which, I believe, we always exist? In every work that I do, I try to approach some truth and I do this while creating illusions. I think that it was Oscar Wilde who said, “Lying is the true aim of art.” For me, this has been a helpful quote. In the end, I think that the only truth that I found, the only one that I can stand behind, is the fact that any reason for getting another painting done is a good one.