Tangle of Natural Order

“Arch Cape, Oregon in the 80’s was a little-known area where the family spent several summer weeks exploring the tide pools and surrounding beaches.  Remnants of a house foundation was discovered at Hug Point by Bart and led to him to do multiple photographs of the wild strawberries, lush ferns, daisies, crocosmia, and other flora in the area.  As a result of time spent in this quiet, out of the way place, a series called the ‘Tangle of Natural Order’ came about.  Large format watercolor paintings with hidden toys or other memorabilia among the greenery presents a magical feeling and a desire to lose oneself among the captivating scenes.”
– Leslie Morse

In Morse’s Tangle of Natural Order works, the viewer is invited to explore an overgrown world of lush vegetation with hidden vignettes and objects. Woven amongst the patterns of leaves, vines, berries, and flowers are numerous cast-off items: photographs, toy cars and animals, cigar boxes, memorabilia, and odds-and-ends. These works are stylistically complex, a cascade of abstract and descriptive elements that merge into shifting pictures that reward both up-close and distanced viewing. Morse’s lively and deft synthesis of shape, color, and form, through the controlled application of paint, demonstrate his mastery of watercolor and integrated techniques, such as collage, stamping, and the use of stencils.

Thematically, the Tangle paintings combine several ideas of genesis and survival. Morse often includes Edenic or other Biblical references, while situated amongst a Darwinian presentation of flora, in all its energy of reproduction and growth. Pictographic symbols and images from rock art are likewise woven into these unusual creation stories, expanding the human participants, or their remnants, beyond the traditionally Western. Beneath the tangled plants and seeming disorder of the compositions are ecological and cultural underpinnings, where past and present have an ongoing relationship, one that is necessary to reseed the next generation.

As with the Southwest Panorama series, Morse used photographs he took on-site (in this case along the Pacific Coast Highway near Arch Cape, Oregon) as sources, and painted these works in his large studio at his Soldier Trail home in Tucson, Arizona. Many of the still-life objects came from his own collection of antiques, ephemera, and the occasional natural history specimen. He especially loved old toys, choosing to include items such as the 1940s stamped metal Wyandotte Woody Station Wagon or a 1920s Garden of Eden Game dexterity puzzle. Aside from the charm of vintage objects, they also serve as vessels for images and narratives of a bygone era, and of a recognition of persistent archetypes and motifs in all sorts of combinations and sources. Morse began many of these explorations in the earlier Casa Seton paintings, which also combine still-life and scenes to evoke memory and stimulate our narrative imagination.

Morse said he found the size, scale, and painstaking rendering of the Tangles tedious and difficult, and as a result, only made a handful of these works. However one can sense the artist’s curiosity and fascination with the hidden, natural world that serves as the inspiration for their making.