Living on the Over Door by Sarah McRae Morton

Artist Statement:

The studio where I am most at home is in rural Lancaster County Pennsylvania. Its a hayloft above horse stalls. A hatch lets in a net of north light, a view of Amish farmed fields and swallows who nest in the rafters. It has been my studio since childhood, shared with my brother and sister, our rabbits, chickens and piglets. We worked at making everything from hay bale forts to murals in this place.

From the day we discovered a secret annex in the barn- behind a hidden door was a room cluttered with relics from a generation past- our fort seemed cast with magic. That discovery may have set us all on our courses to find hidden doors and forgotten places. My brother became a musician, sister a writer, and I am a painter. I read and reread through a trove of art history books kept in the barn. I had walls to freely paint on and subjects in the menagerie of animals. The idea was planted behind my eyes to see more and to look harder- the frontier of curiosity unrolled.

As a teenager, I studied drafting and color theory with Myron Barnstone. I attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the University of Pennsylvania. A travel fellowship was a path to Europe to take a chemistry course in Rome on the chemical composition – or decomposition -of pieces from art history. I traveled to Norway to study with painter Odd Nerdrum. When I returned from abroad, I settled in a coal mining region of West Virginia to make a body of work about the local history, a changing landscape and a knotted family tree. This work yielded a Mattisse Foundation fellowship to attend the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Since, my work has taken me to Cerrillos New Mexico, Carmel California, Baltimore Maryland, to the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson. I currently live in Cologne, Germany but I often return to my first studio- the barn in Pennsylvania’s Amish country. It is my favorite place to work, to remember where I am from and what I have seen elsewhere. I depend on the canon of western art history for my visual vocabulary and lore of my home town for context. I am aware that my lens has been curved, its point of view shifted by travel, books, passed artists and new meetings.

My paintings mimic American academic construction. The compositions draw from a canon of western paintings where a common goal was to deceive the viewer- to build a believable window view to an invented scene by an alchemaiic process using dirt, stone oil, sap, gems and flax.

These creations are pictorial maps of retraced steps, records of the roads taken to try to capture images of people long gone. As there is an optimal viewing distance for every painting, it seems true of history too – perspective clarifies some facts and can obscure what we wish not to see. Its a metaphor I allude to by rendering some detail finely while blurring other passages within the same frame.

My recent works are invented portraits of the shells of tenacious spirits who have survived because their stories are transmitted around campfires, between rocking chairs, and under moth eaten black skies. They had memorable lives or unforgettable brushes with death and left enough legacy, artifacts or genetic residue to retell their stories. The style of my pieces slightly varies according to the prevalent style of art during each main subject’s lifetime, displaying facets of aesthetic traditions or challenges to convention that made American art history. The subjects of my recent paintings are the people from whom I am descended, by blood or by the “marrow of artistic tradition”, all of whom led me to a place and time along a trail of curiosity.