Southwest Panoramas

“Mr. Morse is able to translate the expanse and grandeur of Utah with a difficult medium and a challenging scale. His watercolors are more than landscapes. His art is packed with method, form, color and emotion.”
- Renee B. Fitzpatrick, Phillips Gallery Director, 1988

The Phillips Gallery, located in Salt Lake City, is the oldest commercial gallery in the Intermountain West (1966-present) and represented Morse from 1975-2005 [1].  Morse showed at Phillips Gallery regularly in group exhibitions, submitted work to national watercolor invitationals, and had numerous one-man shows during his career [2]. Some of the most impressive and commercially successful exhibitions for the artist were in the mid to late-1980s. This coincided with an increase in corporate art collecting in the United States. The start of the 1980s saw an economic recession, but by 1983 the economy had rebounded and there was sustained economic growth. The 1980s were marked by major advances in technology that paved the way for massive cultural, medical, and informational technology developments that were evident by the early 1990s. Corporate art collections grew and art in the workplace was considered beneficial for employee productivity to humanize the working environment and to demonstrate business credibility. Art collecting was said to reach its zenith in the 1970s and 1980s with the human relations movement [3]. Corporates such as Western Airlines, Digital Equipment, Wells Fargo Bank, John Deere, Holiday Inn as well as local banks and law firms purchased multiple works by Morse during this time.

In 1985 Phillips Gallery held an exhibition of Morse’s large-scale watercolors depicting the landscape of Northern Arizona and Southern Utah, places that Morse visited extensively during frequent painting, hiking, camping, and fishing excursions. Art critic for The Salt Lake Tribune George Dibble wrote in May 1985 that “Morse’s watercolors of the Escalante River Country report a scenic scale of wonderment and grandeur.” Sales from that show were good - public and private collectors responded to the dramatic scenery and beauty of the paintings which provided access to hard-to-get-to canyons, deserts, deep valleys, and mountains of the Southwest.

Morse traveled with family members and hiking companions to remote wilderness areas in Northern Arizona, Southern Utah, and New Mexico. They backpacked into remote areas including the Grand Canyon South Rim, Keet Seel Canyon, Canyon de Chelly, Vermillion Cliffs, Grand Staircase-Escalante, Navajo Mountain, Grand Gulch, and the Gila Wilderness. 

Trekking into these National Monuments was difficult, but the hikers were rewarded with amazing views of beautiful sandstone arches and natural bridges, water holes, slot canyons, ancient rock art, and remnant cliff dwellings.

…the experience we have as backpackers has helped us to use our deep physical reserves and increase our stamina and hiking skills. The ‘getting away’ from our ‘civilized worry’ and noise to look at the land as a place not to conquer, but to savor, contemplate, and most of all, take us away from the complacency of the non-dangerous life. - Bart J. Morse, Sketchbook entry from a trip to Navajo Mountain, Southern Utah, March 21, 1992

Morse took hundreds of photographic images on these trips and filled sketchbooks with notes as an aide-memoire. As a student of Don Olsen, one of Utah’s most revered teachers and artists, Morse learned to share Olsen’s love for process and the abstract style. He soaked oversized cold press Arches watercolor paper with a garden hose and stapled the wet paper to his studio wall to stretch and dry. Then he sketched the form from drawings and notes made on location. Similar to Olsen’s style, he paints planes, or facets, of color within the lines. One rock cliff becomes an abstract painting in itself [4]. He knew that the landscape was imbued with creation stories and the spirits of the people who had lived there.  Morse was passionate about the rock art made by Native Americans. The landscape was full of mystery and interest to him.

Morse appreciated the geological timescale seen in the layers of rock and water-carved canyons. The paintings capture that visceral sense of time, colors of the canyon walls at different times of the day, and the peacefulness experienced in pristine areas. His research conducted onsite was augmented back in the studio by scholarly books and visits to ethnographic museums such as the Amerind Museum in Arizona.

In 1988, Morse held a one-man show at two locations: with Phillips Gallery in Salt Lake City and the gallery at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. The show was titled Contour Panoramas and featured paintings of landscapes in Utah and Arizona. The paintings are large – up to 52 x 37 in., yet there is an intimacy to these landscapes. The viewer feels encircled by the great rocks, the soft colors, and the clear air. These astonishing views could easily have been overwhelming – but paradoxically they feel safe and nurturing.  Anasazi Canyon, Navajo Mountain (1988) depicts a shimmering pool of precious water, smooth canyon rocks, and the scrubby saltbush. It seems like a silent sacred place characterized by an austere beauty.

Morse painted Navajo Mountain many times. With its dome shape and elevation at 10,388ft, Navajo Mountain straddles the Utah/Arizona border. It has special significance to the First Peoples of the area including the Navajo, Paiute, and the Hopi. Also known as Naatsisʼáán (Earth Head), it is associated with curing sickness, bringing rain, and with the head of the female corn pollen spirit, Earth Woman. 

Morse conveys emotion and the strong sensory experience of being in the Southwest through his paintings. While other Southwest landscape painters often depict the landscape as either harsh and ominous or as an idyllic desert paradise, Morse’s treatment is neither. As an experienced outdoorsman, Morse had great respect for the landscape, understanding its rhythms, dangers, and beauty. The landscape is sumptuous and full of stories and wonder.

Footnotes: Assistance provided by the Marriott Library, University of Utah is gratefully acknowledged.

[1] The gallery kept meticulous records including correspondence, biographical information, statements, sales records, news articles, and brochures all of which are housed at the Marriott Library, University of Utah.
[2] Bart J Morse CV refers.
[3] Kottasz, Rita, Bennett, Roger, Savani, Sharmila, and Ali-Choudhury, Rehnuma. The Role of Corporate Art in the Management of Corporate Identity. Corporate Communications: An International Journal, 13.3, (2008): 235-254. 
[4] Extract from gallery statement by Renee B. Fitzpatrick, Phillips Gallery Director, 1988