Morris Cole Graves (August 28, 1910 – May 5, 2001) was an American expressionist painter. Along with Guy Anderson, Kenneth Callahan, William Cumming, and Mark Tobey, he founded the Northwest School. Graves was also a mystic.
Born the sixth son of a Methodist family in Fox Valley, Oregon, Graves was a country boy. He was a self-taught artist with natural understandings of color and line.
Graves dropped out of high school after his sophomore year a...
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Morris Cole Graves (August 28, 1910 – May 5, 2001) was an American expressionist painter. Along with Guy Anderson, Kenneth Callahan, William Cumming, and Mark Tobey, he founded the Northwest School. Graves was also a mystic.
Born the sixth son of a Methodist family in Fox Valley, Oregon, Graves was a country boy. He was a self-taught artist with natural understandings of color and line.
Graves dropped out of high school after his sophomore year and sailed on three American Mail Line ships with his brother Russell. Upon arriving in Japan, he wrote:
After graduating high school in 1932 in Beaumont, Texas at the urging of his aunt, Graves returned to the Northwest. He spent much of his professional life in Seattle and La Conner, Washington, sharing a studio for a while with Guy Anderson. Graves' early work was in oils and focused on birds touched with strangeness, either blind, or wounded, or immobilized in webs of light.
In the early 1930s, Graves studied Zen Buddhism. In 1934, Graves...
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