Geo. Morrison's Lake Superior Driftwood Sculpture

Title:Collage IX: Landscape
Artist:George Morrison
Date:1974
Medium:Wood
Dimensions:60 1/8 x 168 1/2 x 3 in. (152.72 x 427.99 x 7.62 cm)
Creation Place:North America, United States, Great Lakes/Woodlands region.

George Morrison
(Grand Portage Band of Chippewa)
Contemporary artist George Morrison is recognized as one of the most significant 20th-century Native American painters.

Born in 1919 on the Grand Portage Indian Reservation near Grand Marais, Minnesota, Morrison went on to study with the New York Art Students League and in France with support from a Fulbright scholarship. He later returned to his homeland, where he rediscovered his Anishinaabe roots. Morrison found the north shore of Lake Superior especially inspiring. He once described this personal journey as a "search for my own reality; I seek the power of the rock, the magic of the water, the religion of the tree, the color of the wind and the enigma of the horizon."

He envisioned the horizon of Lake Superior to be "the edge of the world," and in 1967began to focus artistically on the horizon line, which he described as "more of an obsession." He confided, "I have been using it ever since, as a focal point, to identify the landscape."

In 1970 Morrison began teaching art at the University of Minnesota, where he too produced numerous outstanding young Native and non-Native artists. He never stopped learning, exploring nature and venturing forward through his paintings. Most of his later life he spent painting back home in northern Minnesota. He walked a lot around the surrounding area and once revealed, "There is a spirituality in the landscape at my studio in Grand Portage: the water and the air and the atmosphere. All those elements are coming into me from what I see. I'm not looking at it like I'm painting it. But all of these things are in my mind. It is alive and it changes by the hour. Perhaps that very thing has been transplanted into my head, and then I'm transforming that onto the canvas." To read more of this excerpt comparing Morrison with Southwest Native American artist, Hauser,click here.

He was married to Hazel Belvo, another Minnesota artist, who taught at Minneapolis College of Art and Design and Saint Paul Academy and is known for her series of pieces based on the Witch Tree. Morrison passed away in Grand Marais.