THE SHAMANS GAZE - MORRIS GRAVES Painting

I was born January 1948 in Bremerton Washington. My father a sailor and my mother living with my grandmother in Port Orchard. I grew up in South Tacoma with a woods and lake linked by a broad field long before the freeway. I began my career at the age of seven, having drawn and painted from an early age. In eighth grade I had my first art instruction with the great artist and teacher Richard Rhea. We studied all the media from drawing to painting and ceramics. I could feel a talent and desire and was encouraged. I started oil painting when I was fourteen. I also was adept at drafting. I took drafting classes in high school along with every art class available. I landed a job with Gordon and Cross, Electrical Engineering in 1965. I was seventeen, drafting up blueprints, working after school, weekends and summers. After more than two years in the office, I decided not to be an architect and devoted myself to fine arts, emphasizing Painting. I gained altitude at community colleges and a year at Western Washington State College where I had my first college level painting course. In the summer of 1969 I was drafted as an Army illustrator and spent a year in Baltimore Maryland. I was twenty three and for the first time experienced world class Art in New York, Washington DC, Boston and Baltimore. The following year I was stationed in Saigon Vietnam. An exotic year of living off base at the foot of a dead end street in an apartment with a rooftop patio. I returned to the northwest and to college and found a graduate student at the University of Puget Sound to teach me wheel throwing. I immersed myself in ceramics, sculpture and printmaking for a year. Thus I began throwing and teaching wheel ceramics, firing kilns and was introduced to raku, bronze casting, foundry work and embossed serigraphs. Here again with Richard Rhea and also study with Frank Dipolito in Printmaking. I was accepted to the Fine Arts program at the University of Washington in 1973 and completed my degree in 1977 with a major in painting and minor in ceramics. After graduation I spent the later part of the year on a freighter in the Aleutian Islands. Returning from the Aleutians, I acquired my fist independent studio to begin a dedicated evolution towards practicing my skills. I spent substantial time devoted to refining skills in painting, sculpture, printmaking and ceramics.