Step Into Liquid
Published in Richard Allen Morris: Retrospective 1958-2004.
* Please do not reprint without permission
Lomaland
As a teenager I often went camping with my Boy Scout Troup to the uninhabited end of Point Loma, the peninsula between San Diego Harbor and the Pacific Ocean. In those years, besides the beautiful and expansive military cemeteries and a decaying lighthouse museum, there were the ruins of Battery Ashburn: concrete gun emplacements and hidden cliff-side complexes built during World War II to repel an expected invasion. We crawled through the underground tunnels and barracks, past old military vehicles and scraps of clothing before jumping over razor wire strung six inches above the ground in long ranks parallel to the ocean. On a bluff overlooking the beach we found something that felt very different: an abandoned outdoor Greek amphitheater. Emoting on the stage between rows of Doric columns, we were amazed by the precise acoustics. This magical spot along with a few other buildings and neglected gardens were the remnants of the national headquarters of the Theosophical Society in America. Named the School for the Revival of the Lost Mysteries of Antiquity when founded by Katherine Tingley in 1896, the Society was a rich and complex community supporting artistic, social, and political causes. It included the Raja Yoga School, which had 300 students by 1910, a commune of committed artists, an art academy, a theater company, a music recital hall, and a publishing house. The slogan on the cover of the children’s magazine published by the Society read: “Children of Light, as ye go forth into the world, seek to render noble service to all that lives,” Madame Tingley and the Society were especially outspoken pacifists during the years of World War I. While the Xanadu was initially shunned by San Diegans as too strange and radical, when Madame Tingley was attacked by the Los Angeles Times as a cult leader who abused the children in her care, the people and politicians in San Diego rallied to her defense: “Something in the Point Loma community – its eerily beautiful buildings, its nature-based mysticism, it ambitious program in the arts, its sense of the Other Side shimmering on the horizon of the Pacific – spoke to the collective San Diego identity in a way that leavened an otherwise ordinary American city with the mystical and the aesthetic.”
Since its buildings were on the crest of Point Loma, Lomaland was visible from downtown San Diego and the residential neighborhoods in the surrounding hills. There was an enormous colored glass dome on one of the Lomaland buildings with three additional brilliantly colored domes around it. “Glistening white, the circular building reached skyward in two tiers, and was magnificently topped by a voluminous dome of amethyst-tinted glass. Madame Tingley, an amateur architect, had a bent for what can only be described as freakish Oriental bizarre; she later had the domes of both buildings crowned with glass spheres nearly twenty feet in diameter, and on top of those she added ornamental flaming hearts. From across the bay, and to the citizens of San Diego, Point Loma began to look more and more like a colony from another planet. At night, from out at sea, the illuminated spires were beacons far more eye-catching than the government’s lighthouse.”
When doing research, a black and white photograph on the cover of “The New Century,” the newspaper published by the Society in the early 1900s, especially struck me. The photographer, who must have been somewhere downtown, lined up his camera so that the half circle of the sun was directly behind the dome of the largest building in Lomaland, the highest point along silhouette of Point Loma. The dome repeated the shape of the sun, and I can imagine how the glass of the domes and their corresponding globes must have reflected the color of the sunset, throwing multicolored rays back into the sky.
Light was the theme of many paintings produced by the artists of the Society. The moment at sunset was especially meaningful for them because they envisioned that these sunrays, formed as the sky turned dark, could led them to a better world. As one of the artists wrote, “The correspondence between the colors of the solar spectrum and the sounds that are employed by musicians is so strangely close that it is a matter of surprise that there has not been yet developed an art of pure color corresponding to the art of pure sound which we call music.”
Now, Sunset Cliffs, the area of the Pacific coast directly below the Greek amphitheater is a fabled spot for surfing on the legendary breaks at Nubes and Indicators. Locals gather along the shore to watch the sunset and join the surfers at the end of the day, hoping to see the green flash as the sun disappears into the ocean. I’ve read that there are plans to make the area into a park, planting gardens and building bridges to recreate a part of Lomaland from old photographs.
Richard’s Studio
Thinking of Richard Allen Morris’ studio in San Diego over the last few years, I’ve often found myself trying to remember Lomaland. At first I couldn’t understand why.
Richard’s current studio is in an old residential neighborhood of bungalows and apartment houses. The entrance is a short flight of stairs and a narrow door. I find that crossing the threshold into his studio takes me further away from the sunny streets outside than seems possible. The studio feels like a secret place – underground, dark, and complex. I would never expect it to be there. But what surprises me more, is that crossing into his world is unfathomably quick and easy. I can never recount exactly how that crossing took place.
Inside, near the entrance to Richard’s former downtown studio, there used to be a wall crowded with hundreds of various small works hung salon-style. In this current studio, it’s as through that salon-style wall had been pivoted ninety degrees from the vertical to the horizontal and increased in size until it became a floor on which to walk and to thread a path between different works. Richard’s studio is jammed full and packed tightly. It is impossible at first to take it all in. I’m always disoriented and I have to force myself to scan over everything again and again. Every time I look, I see something new. Sometimes there will be a wonderful painting that I see right away and sometimes my eyes will pass over a work three or four times before it materializes. Everything can seem ordinary and then suddenly a painting jumps out at me that is so amazing that I lose my breath.
There is always something new, something surprising - a box of drawings for shaped canvases which were never turned into paintings from the 70s, a collage sculpture from the 60s that includes a brush tied to a palette evoking the work of Joseph Beuys, a 3-D drawing shaped like a cube, a thickly painted orange object shaped to fit snugly into the corner between two walls, strips of canvas cut in the shape of men’s ties and painted (to be worn to openings), a drawing made up of separate bits of paper and assorted objects in a flat plastic bag titled “Nest”, a toy couch covered with reclining paint for Matisse’s tired business man, and isolated brush marks on canvas cut out and pinned over bookshelves.
Richard or I will pick up the paintings as we talk and I ask questions. I always experience Richard’s work in relation to my body. For example, I notice that one painting of a single vertical white brush stroke is signed upside down on the painting’s top edge. As I turn the painting over, I see that the white mark becomes a figure. This painting is abstract in one orientation, figurative in another. Afraid my foot was touching the back of a canvas, I once looked down to see a signature: “John Baldessari” and a date from the early 60s. I was amazed. “Oh,” Richard said, “I have two or three landscapes.” (Later, Baldessari, an old friend and colleague of Richard’s, told me that these were some of the few paintings to escape incineration in his “Cremation Project” 1970.)
Sometimes I take my favorites away from where I find them, lining them up against a wall or on a box to see them in relation to each other. Once, when Richard handed me an especially amazing painting, I thought that if I ran for the door he couldn’t stop me. Dodging through and vaulting over the piles, I could make it out. But shaking, I tried to calm down and control my excitement, fearing that I was making Richard nervous. Several years later, I asked about the painting and tried to describe it. “Oh,” he said, “I know the one.” And a minute later he returned with “Untitled” (1988). There is a group of paintings that I saw one summer that I think of often – thick turquoise, gold, and silver paint, sometimes on oval or circular canvases. These paintings especially reminded me of the light and color outside of the studio. If Fontana had painted in San Diego, he would have been lucky to paint such works.
While we are looking at paintings, Richard and I often talk about other painters. This is such a great pleasure because he has so much knowledge about a wide range of past and current painting. As an active participant in the local artistic community, he often extols the virtues of others’ work, talks about his trades and purchases, and fills me in on the local history. I’m often impressed by how well informed Richard is about historical and current international painting. For example, when we were talking about obsessive painters, who love to continue working and reworking their old paintings, we spoke of Soutine and a nearly forgotten New Yorker, a tough guy, who painted images for movie posters and later developed an exotically colored cubist style. He was a colleague and favorite of the abstract expressionists named Earl Kerkam. Kerkam was notorious for going to dinner parties with a pencil or even a hidden palette, reworking one of his paintings when the host was out of the room. Richard amazed me by pulling out a small notebook in which he had pasted images, difficult to find, of quite a few paintings by Kerkam. Kerkam’s name was on the spine and I saw that there were dozens of other such notebooks.
Richard’s studio is a Lomaland for our time. It’s an alternative, an underground version of the idealistic society that has vanished, and now is a nearly forgotten memory. Once I hesitantly told Richard about the connection that I had made. “Tremendous loss,” he said of Lomaland, “What a paradise.”
Light and Liquid – Richard’s Paintings
By working quickly on small paintings, Richard is able to recharge himself with the new discoveries that he makes in each work. I think his speed of execution and the size of the works reinforce each other. A viewer has a palpable experience of the excitement of the discovery made in each painting. This charge is what keeps Richard excited about the next painting and the fluidity of his ever-evolving visual language. Both physically and conceptually, he leaves nothing unconsidered, rethinking painting again and again. This is how he keeps going his amazing and vital productivity. His wonderful titles also reveal this excitement and intelligence. Even where and how Richard signs the paintings warrants careful decisions. “How exciting it’s going to be,” he told me, “to sign 2000.” “Life is Joy” was Madame Tinguely’s motto.
Sometimes I feel that our experience can be divided into the liquid and the solid. Liquid experience is the world of the visual. “My Brain” (1974) is a painting about witnessing this liquid world: a painting of a brain turning into liquid. In one sense the title refers to Richard’s brain. While working, a painter can identify with the paint and this identification embeds itself into the physicality of the paint as it dries. In this case, Richard has put multiple colors on the canvas and smeared them all together in one bravura gesture, making, out of the varied liquids, a swirling movement that is becoming a form. In another sense, the title of this painting can refer to our brains if, while looking at the painting, we also choose to experience the world as liquid.
Sunsets are an especially good subject for the experiment of visualizing the world as liquid. As the sun goes down it can seem as if variously colored liquids are gradually flowing one into another from pink, to magenta, to purple. These changes are sometimes difficult to discern. It helps to look away for a moment and then look back to be convinced that the changes are really taking place. The light of the San Diego sunset is the light that I often see in Richard’s paintings. “Untitled” (1991) looks like a depiction of a sunset over the ocean – flashes of colored light dazzle the eye with spinning and transforming energies. Along with the changing hues during a sunset there is also the overall change from light to dark. In this painting there are strong contrasts of value forming an underlying structure for the brighter hues that is like the struggle between the primacy of value or hue during a sunset. This gives the painting a moody feeling not apparent at first. When the sun finally disappears below the horizon, the additional sudden darkness can sometimes, for a few seconds, seem to stop time. The green flash or other flashes of light that can occur at this moment can seem outside of linear time and this is why they are especially evocative. This moment is prolonged when the sun sets into more transparent water horizon of the ocean. This painting of Richard’s seems like that moment of stopped time. The paint, as in many of his paintings, is overlaid wet into wet and the smearing of one color into another reveals how long it took to make each gesture and in what order these gestures were made. The process is frozen in place as the paint dries, but it can sometimes seem to continue as one’s eyes wander over the painting, noticing new colors and combinations. Looking at a painting one has to do just the opposite of what one does looking at a sunset, instead of looking away one needs the patience to instead keep looking.
“Decoys”, 1986, is another painting related to sunset light, even though the colors are not descriptive of a sunset at all. The diagonal edges of the central brown triangular shape imply raking light, but the central form that should be the lighter in value if it is light, is instead darker. The thick white acrylic marks were squeezed directly from the tube onto the canvas with deft flicking motions. This method of application shows great confidence and skill because it has to be accomplished quickly, yet continuously. There is no chance to go back and make corrections. I’m especially fascinated by the way the acrylic paint, as it comes from the tube, breaks apart into smaller pieces. Some of these pieces have flat ends, broken by gravity, and others have ends that are formed into long thin points from being pulled against gravity. Light reflects and changes on the surface of these thick white bits of paint, reminding me of the flickering light of a sunset. Because California light is so strong, it can be harsh and destructive. The contrasts can be so stark that all hues risk elimination. This pressure towards value rather than hue, metaphorically presenting shadows as the truth of California light, implies a noir California, different from the pastel hues so often depicted. Is this painting perhaps some kind of dark, or inverse sunset? Is it, in fact, a decoy?
“Untitled” (1967) consists of two canvases that can fit together in several different orientations since there are reversed signatures on the top and the bottom of the two canvases. These multiple signatures show a complex identification, varied and dualistic, that exceeds the function of naming the artist. The signatures are an acceptance of the changing nature and mutability of identity. One way that the paintings can be hung is on the corner of two walls. In this configuration, the canvases become perpendicular to each other and create a multiple horizon that seems endless. Applied with spray and templates, the florescent day-glow pink and yellow shapes seem like waves or islands. With these bright colors the painting can in one way seem like a happy, or even psychedelic sunset, a 60s version of theosophical spiritualism. Or, these same colors can change their meaning and instead seem like the terrifying lights from a nuclear explosion or disaster. On very clear days looking out to the Pacific from San Diego, one can see a few islands off the coast, including San Clemente. “According to defense experts, San Diego’s comparative advantage was no longer so much its vaunted bay as the secretive and little-known offshore island of San Clemente. The true ‘crown jewel of the San Diego Navy’ in the age of stealth warships and electronic warfare, San Clemente (legally in Orange County) provided convenient instrumented test ranges above, upon, and underneath the sea – a resource unmatched anywhere in the world. Infinitely bombed, strafed, and torpedoed, this offshore landscape of destruction had become as important to the San Diego economy as Sea World or the zoo.” Richard’s painting “Untitled (1967) suggests the dualities of these contradictory identities of San Diego as both a beautiful, even spiritual landscape, and as the site of frightening military industries.
Recently, Richard has shown an inclination towards working on thin vertical paintings. These compressed bars of light, further compressed in his crowded studio, seem like rays from a sunset, captured and pulled into his realm. His studio has absolutely no natural light and these paintings serve as a replacement for the missing daylight. It is always sunset time in Richard’s studio. Flashes of light have been saved in a dark place below the horizon.
California’s other primary element is water, which also has dual meanings. The Pacific Ocean along with its beauty can be an image of the void, an unsurpassable edge, an image of death. Point Loma is the furthest point Southwest in the United States. In 1931, the literary journalist Edmund Wilson visited San Diego and wrote an essay entitled, “The Jumping-off Place”, in which he pointed out that San Diego had the highest suicide rate in the United States. Swimming pools are an attempt to control and domesticate the power of water and thus have especially dualistic connotations of both pleasure and danger. When in water, one can lose a sense of exactly where the surface of one’s body ends or begins. This can be a pleasurable experience of oneness with nature or can be a frightening loss of identity.
Richard’s painting “Fishing” (1991) is to me a reflection of an especially Californian experience of water. The surface of the painting, with the darker opening in the center, is like a pool. This opening in the center through which one can fall is a reference that has been used by a number of painters including Barnett Newman’s “Pagan Void” (1946), Jackson Pollock’s “The Deep (1953), Willem de Kooning’s “Door to the River” (1960), and Jasper Johns “Diver” (1963). “Fishing” implies these connections while also suggesting fishing in the sense of exploring these traditions in painting. This is a painting about experiencing painting, as every painter sometimes does, through learning from what other painters have done. There is sly wit in the thick, white, worm-like acrylic mark, but there is also a sense of fear, a darkness closing in. The painting is unusual in Richard’s work for being framed. When one looks closely one sees that it is painted on a kind of pre-made painting board, also something unusual in Richard’s work. The paint is even thicker than usual and there are counter textures in the painting, textures built up and crossing over each other. Richard’s paintings usually have a speed and directness that comes from having been painted all in one go so there are no textures from previous sessions under the final surface. All these are clues to realizing that Richard has in fact painted over another painting. On the back this in confirmed. He has signed his name over another signature: that of a Joseph G. Barnett. This is a painting made on top of another painting probably bought at a flee-market or thrift store. Richard’s signature almost obscures the signature below it. He has both used Joseph G. Barnett’s work, an homage of a kind, and also made it his own by nearly completely obliterating the original painting. Has he destroyed Joseph G. Barnett’s identity? Or has he transformed that identity into his own? These are troubling questions which painters face when they acknowledge tradition.
Sand on the Floor
Leaving Richard’s studio I’m emotionally drained by the charge of his works. I stumble into the light outside and get into the car so confused that I often get lost returning to my parents’ house, even though I’ve made the trip thousands of times. I leave astounded by the worlds that I have seen, amazed by the new works revealed. I think of Richard as the painter laureate of San Diego. But his work is more. It is a whole Escuela de San Diego, all by one artist..
I love visiting the small countryside chapels in Italy and I wish there could be in San Diego some kind of space like that, a secular chapel, for Richard’s work. It could be right by the beach so surfers, locals and tourists coming down to watch the sunset could discover and appreciate his paintings. The proposed park at Sunset Cliffs would be a good location.