At 90, Graves was the final survivor of a group of four dubbed the "Mystic Painters of the Northwest" in a 1953 Life magazine feature. Along with Mark Tobey, Guy Anderson and Kenneth Callahan, Graves epitomized not necessarily a style of painting but a philosophical outlook that combined Eastern religious beliefs and a deep appreciation of the cycles of the natural world.

As a young architecture student in 1963, my world was opened by the discovery of these 4 mystic painters. Sometime in the early 90s I went to a Morris Graves show and was shocked to discover that, not only was Morris Graves still alive, but he was doing his best work. He was painting flower still lifes. Where his early work pushed his eastern philosophy, his later work did not. And by not pushing it, these later paintings became all the more powerful statements of his mysticism.

The wounded wilderness of Morris Graves

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The wounded wilderness of Morris Graves
is not the same wild west
the white man found
It is a land that Buddha came upon
from a different direction

Check out the entire poem by Ferlinghetti.

A little page with larger views of these images.