Featured Artists
Sarah McRae Morton with, “The Dandelion Gardener”
Descending the spine of the stairs at the core of Rembrandt’s Amsterdam house, Sarah McRae Morton envisioned “The Progress of Pilgrims”, the painting that plays out on the chess board floor at the landing of the spiral which leads to Rembrandt’s studio, where he worked from 1639 until 1658. The artist’s self-portrait brings to mind Andrew Wyeth’s “Trodden Weed” -the painting of himself from the knees down wearing Howard Pyle’s boots.
Morton places the viewer in her own shoes, nude in color they look in style more like those that Vincent Van Gogh painted in 1886- whose eyelets, crow’s feet, ownership and symbolism were hotly debated by philosophers and historians such as Heidegger, Schapiro and Derrida in the mid- 20th century.
Morton’s paintings included in the show “The Dandelion Gardener” refer to the past, to artists whose haunts she has made pilgrimages to but belong to her own time and place. She lives between two worlds- her native rural Pennsylvania, and Cologne Germany. Her works are not merely homages, but are metaphorical- as history repeats itself. In her work she tells stories of her ancestors, of people who traveled seeking refuge, rest, work or the thrill of the unknown. Winslow Homer’s paintings of rural America post-civil war and George Bellow’s World War One pieces are alluded to in several works. The center piece of the show is “The Secrets of the Dandelion Gardener” a piece that is at once celebratory and heart wrenching, depending on where you imagine flowers strewn to six feet high.