This visually stunning book will be a revelation to admirers of Northwest visionary artist Morris Graves (b. 1910) who know him chiefly through his profoundly original, metaphysically charged paintings of chalices, birds, snakes, and other small creatures. Graves’s national reputation began with the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibitions "Americans 1942--18 Artists from 9 States." Throughout his long career as one of America’s most highly regarded painters of the transcendental, Graves has been less well known for his later flower paintings, represented here in more than fifty full-page color plates encompassing selected works from 1938 through 1992. A number of these paintings first captures public attention in 1983-84, during the course of a retrospective, " Morris Graves, Vision of the Inner Eye," organized by the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., which travelled to six major American museums. In the past decade, Graves’s flower paintings have continued to command increasing critical and public acclaim. In the view of noted art critic Theodore Wolff, whose superb analysis informs this presentation, Graves has created several dozen of the finest American flower paintings of the century. A product of Graves’s later years, these serene and radiantly beautiful paintings show distinct compositional parallels with a significant number of his early symbolic and metaphoric works. At the same time, they incorporate the dramatic shift in emphasis that took place in his art during the 1970s, when flowers and light began to embody his evolving sense of what color could be and could do. To a very real degree, notes Wolff, the flower paintings are Graves’s culminating work, epitomizing and summarizing his lifelong attempts to translate the spiritually ineffableinto pictorial form. In addition to Theodore F. Wolff’s inspired and insightful essay, Morris Graves: Flower Paintings features an excellent introduction by John Yau, art critic and author of recent book on A.R. Penck and Andy Warhol. The book will be of significant interest to collectors as well as to art historians.

Morris Graves is a major American painter with roots in the Pacific Northwest. Morris Graves: Selected Letters draws on a vast cache of the his unpublished correspondence, dating from his teenage years until his death in 2001. Few visual artists of any era have left such a rich and wide-ranging collections of letters, which makes this body of work an unusual and valuable document in American art. The Graves correspondence is remarkable for its scope, variety, and depth. Written to many correspondents over long periods of time, the letters include the artist's reflections on his art, the art world, philosophy (Zen Buddhism and Vedanta in particular), architecture (Graves designed his homes and gardens), and relationships with family, friends, and lovers. Graves himself preserved most of the letters, or copies of them, and put no restrictions on their use. Other letters come from a wide range of private and institutional sources. Among the correspondents are Graves's family; Marian Willard, his art dealer; Richard Svare, his companion in the 1950s; and Nancy Wilson Ross, novelist and Buddhist scholar. Other notable figures with whom Graves corresponded are poet Carolyn Kizer, art critic Theodore Wolff, curator Peter Selz, choreographer Merce Cunningham (for whom Graves created a set design), and painter Mark Tobey. Recurrent themes in the Graves letters are the tensions between sociability and solitude; the desire to be free of the material world versus the need for material comfort; the dismissal of commerce and the desperate need for money; the pleasures and pitfalls of love; and the difficulties of the creative life. The letters are organized topically under the broad categories of people (family, friends, intimates), places (homes and travels), and art (finances and philosophy).

* Chronicles the myth and relationships of the artists of the "Northwest School"

Sounds of the Inner Eyeexplores the artistic and biographical connection among three of the Pacific Northwest's most significant and highly respected artists. Mark Tobey, often aligned with the abstract expressionists, was a pioneer in integrating elements of Asian art into mystical, calligraphic paintings. Morris Graves, known as something of an art world maverick, combined Eastern religious beliefs and a deep appreciation of the natural world in his work, focusing initially on the Northwest's birds and vegetation. John Cage, an avant-garde composer, philosopher, writer, and printmaker, began his visual creations with graphic representations of musical scores, and then evolved to include printmaking, drawing, and watercolor.Sounds of the Inner Eyeexplores the lives and careers of these three men who were instrumental in leading a community of artists, patrons, and scholars into a deeper understanding of the potential and power of art and, in turn, had a large impact on much of what followed in modern art in America. Known as the Northwest Mystics, they were influenced by Eastern philosophies and the natural beauty of the Pacific Rim. Their legendary nickname has remained over time, helping to establish the Northwest as a center for artistic talent, worthy of the admiration of the international art community.

One girl, one painting a day...can she do it? Linda Patricia Cleary decided to challenge herself with a year long project starting on January 1, 2014. Choose an artist a day and create a piece in tribute to them. It was a fun, challenging, stressful and psychological experience. She learned about technique, art history, different materials and embracing failure. Here are all 365 pieces. Enjoy!

William Cumming began as a self-taught artist who grew up in Tukwila, a small town outside Seattle. In 1937, at the age of twenty, he met Morris Graves, who was at that time working in Seattle for the Federal Art project of the Works Progress Administration. Through Graves he soon became part of the circle of friends who came to be known as the Northwest School of artists: Mark Tobey, then nearing fifty, the patriarchal leader of the group; Kenneth Callahan and his wife Margaret, a writer and critic who became Cumming's particular mentor; Guy Anderson, Lubin Petric, and others. He has taught for many years at the Art Institute of Seattle and Cornish College of the Arts. "Bill Cumming is at once an exceptional and successful regional artist and one of the most erudite, perceptive, and entertainingly cantankerous characters in this part of the world. [He] tells what it was like to be an artist in the Great Depression, tells tales out of school about such international luminaries as Mark Tobey and Morris Graves, tells how the Northwest School (of which he was the youngest member) developed, tells about the early success -- and ultimate failure -- of the Communist movement in the Far West, and shows how the political, economic, and cultural events of a half-century affected the life of a region and of its creative minority. Cumming is a natural raconteur, equipped with more literary wit and charm than most professional writers." -- Tom Robbins "Besides being one of the Northwest's best painters, Bill Cumming has certainly had a knack for being, historically speaking, in the right place at the right time. Beyond being good local history, hisSketchbookis a moving, sometimes chillingly perceptive, and certainly fascinating glimpse into the nature of artists themselves." -- Wesley Wehr

"The surrealism of those shows percolated into Martin's psyche, and his paintings - once he started to trust his own view of things - began to sprout the ambiguities of burlesque and the black humor of slapstick. Now when Martin paints a Northwest scene, it's likely to be peopled with freaks and floozies. He stays up nights listening to the radical opinions on Art Bell's radio talk show, and he considers the Jerry Springer show a new form of vaudeville. Martin transforms the daily input of the media into the wild stream-of-consciousness of his paintings - for him both a compulsive kind of storytelling and a way of escape."--BOOK JACKET.