Morris Graves by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 2016-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Graves hoped that the Otters (painters Jan Thompson, Richard Gilkey, and Ward Corley) would join him and Richard Svare in Ireland.

Morris Graves to Richard Gilkey

Dublin, Ireland, March 19, 1956

I don’t ever want to come back to America, and I’ve had in mind for a long time that you would be the first one I’d tell if plans looked like they were really going to materialize so that I definitely knew we had a real chance of settling permanently in Ireland—in Europe.…

This is what I want to know: Would you write me at once, soberly and very thoughtfully, telling me what you would think of joining Richard and I in Ireland while we got this place under way for a permanent home in place of Careladen. If I do decide to sell Careladen and would send you enough money to clear your debts and travel to Ireland, would you come here, and do you honestly think that we could induce Jan and Ward to come here for a long enough period of time to see if they could settle here and paint and give up America.…

I don’t propose an art colony, as you well know, and you know that all I am proposing is one possible solution for us all to get away from the confusing crush of life at home and get to a place where there is an infinitely greater possibility that our lives as painters will come to something besides just the heartbreaking ego and personality competition of America, where artists and poets are distorting their vitality and pouring out their vital energy in the struggle to give some spiritual meaning to America and being trampled over and kicked in the face by that mentality that values art in its list of “musts” along with clothes and Cadillacs and TV and barbecue pits, etc., etc., etc.—even though in America we have been brought up on that deadly diet of individual independency. Dog eat dog!

TYPED LETTER, UO

Dorothy Schumacher to Morris Graves and Richard Svare

Edmonds, Washington, April 15, 1956

Dearest Morris and Richard—

Word comes from you that you are perhaps returning soon to America—and now today as I was pruning frozen-dead moss-roses—Jan came over to tell me that you are actually on the verge of sailing! I feel a great dismay and concern over this news. To me (if it means that you plan to return here to live) it seems like a step back into a gulf of nothingness—so this letter comes as a kind of warning.

As I write, at an hour nearing midnight in a small cottage on two acres of dried grass in North Edmonds—several jets are roaring past overhead. During the day, of course, it’s much worse—about every half hour and completely deafening and low enough to see the color of the pilot’s eyes. I hope I can put some quality of urgency into this letter—that I feel you

MUST NOT

return to this land of mundane chaos and hopelessness to live—or that at the last moment an inner intuitive warning of your own or the hand of God stays your departure.

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