Featured Artists

Sarah McRae Morton

Artist Statement

Throughout childhood in rural Pennsylvania, I painted what I observed and what I imagined from my perch above a carousel of animals turning through the years, rotating stalls, making predictable but ceaselessly wondrous circles from new life to death. In the barn loft was a secret annex. It was hidden behind a panel of tongue and groove wood flush along the wall hung on rust brittled hinges. It had been a fort to a kid who left it cluttered with relics of his time and things he loved. By the time I leaned on the wall and fell into the room cast with magic, the boy was surely grown and long gone. I dwelt on the mystery of the annex’s former tenant and the question of what, of my time, I would leave in other secret rooms and forgotten places. It was there in his fort-turned my studio-that I first cracked the spine of a book on art history and I fell through another threshold. Layers of dirt, gems, oil, sap, flax mounted on geometric scaffolding made a canon of western paintings with a common goal to deceive a viewer. My imagination was captured by the alchemy of inventing scenes that unfold from tactile but imaginary windows. The idea was planted behind my eyes to see more, look harder, to build other deceptive doors that are portals to the past. A frontier of curiosity unrolled and I left home to study art.

I crisscrossed the country, then moved to Europe, conducted by curiosity, capturing sense of place in pockets that had fed my artistic predecessors and where my family’s lore was born. I retraced the steps of people whose plights were to find work, resources, refuge or rest and I saw the flickering of restless spirits.
Artifacts found in the wakes of such people are reminders that the past is not dead; graphite scrawl, silver gelatin shadows, root stock of bred roses, palpable legacies remembered by fireside under moth eaten black skies. These traces and the conventions of art unique to each of their lifetimes, a parallel story, have helped me invent portraits and relay the stories of a succession people, whose fates led to my chances. With a fellowship for a residency at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson Vermont in 2013, I began the paintings included in the “Latest and Recent Work” folder. It was a time and place of such plenty that the grass under apple trees smelled of cider in September. It was fertile ground to paint about the yield, the frost, the far away angle of repose of the fruit of family trees.

I have lived in Germany since 2010, but often return to my first studio, the barn loft in rural Pennsylvania. It is where I paint with most clarity on the subject of where I am from, what I have found elsewhere, what I wish to see and hope to leave in secret rooms.

“The past is never dead, it is not even past.” – William Faulkner