Mr. Morton, in the studio, with a paintbrush
By Mark J. Lucas |
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For the last seventeen years, James Morton has lived in a room about the size of large utility closet with nothing but a mattress, a cat named Shamu, and his paintings. It is a rare lifestyle anymore, which is fitting, as his particular technique - Old Masters-style oil painting, like that of Michelangelo, Da Vinci, and Raphael - is also fairly rare these days.
James Morton
Photo: Christopher Atwood
And so I stand before his home, an enormous stone building, just west of I-71, near Fifth Avenue. Formerly the public school of an extinct town called Milo, it is now the site of Milo Arts, a community that houses various kinds of artists, writers, and performers - many of whom share restrooms and kitchens, many of whom tend the community garden, people hungry to find an urban life that bucks the urban norm. And then there's Morton.
"My whole interest in painting rose up around the desire to paint like the Old Masters," says Morton, 62. "There was a single incident when I was thirteen, when I went on a school field trip to Carnegie Museum, in Pittsburg, where I was amazed at these Old Master paintings. I said 'I want to paint like that,' so I just sort of set my cap on figuring out how they had done it."
He seems to have indeed figured it out, but in his own way. The form is, as Morton puts it, "not magic;" it took extensive training - which requires teachers. But, when he attended the University of Wisconsin's Master of Fine Arts program in the 1970s, the school didn't particularly specialize in teaching his chosen style.
"It would have been very hard to go to school for it in those days - what you would call traditional, Old Master, figurative, representational art," says Morton. "Lately, it's been revived, but I really had to acquire these techniques and skills myself, from my own study and experimentation. When I was painting, abstraction and modernism were much more prevalent."
Not only is Morton's technique unique, but also his chosen subject matter. All of the paintings adorning the walls of his space are female nudes, contorted into unusual poses, which he tells me is based on a 16th-century style called Mannerism. In Mannerism, figures are distorted and forced to fall into geometrical patterns.
"I was always sort of intrigued by contortionism," explains Morton. "I wanted to twist the figure to the point where it no longer resembled the body of a human being, so much as it resembled that of an insect. I want it to seem somewhat strange."
Mission accomplished. The paintings, which I am informed each require about a month of 8-hour days to complete, are boldly unusual. There is, however, some market for them. In the last few months, Morton has moved his work into a larger studio across the hall, so that it can be more easily viewed, whereas the paintings were prior-to stacked against a wall. In addition, an exhibition of Morton's work can be found hanging in Riverwatch Gallery, owned and operated by another local artist, Pat Durkin, who crafts custom fine art rugs. The open house will be held Friday, May 15th.
James Morton's painting hanging in the Riverwatch Gallery
Photo: Christopher Atwood
"It's an incredibly powerful exhibition," says Durkin. "There's no doubt that our community has a number of outstanding painters of note, but in my humble opinion, you would have to include James Morton's work in the upper echelon of Central Ohio's elite talent. His nudes would compare favorably in any gallery you might find in New York or Western Europe."
A large portion of the sale of Morton's work will be given to the Milo Arts community, in which he lives and works, for the purpose of upkeep and renovation.
A self-taught, Old Master-style oil painter, specializing in contorted nudes, who lives in a 200-square-foot studio space in a repurposed school building on the East Side, accompanied by a cat named Shamu, and subsisting on a diet composed almost solely of oatmeal mixed with vegetables, James Morton is, without a doubt, an exceptionally eccentric individual, but one cannot argue with the results. All the pieces in his studio are signposts of the road less traveled, some in meticulous detail so crystal clear that I could hardly distinguish them from photographs. The art is rendered in classic perfection, while the artist is the very picture of a square peg, and one of Columbus' true hidden treasures.
Milo Arts
617 E Third Ave.
www.miloarts.com
Riverwatch Gallery4554 Starrett Rd.
www.riverwatchgallery.com
Originally Published: May 1, 2009
