Posted: Wednesday, January 4, 2012 12:00 am
Tideland News WriterIt somehow seems appropriate that Hubert-based, 63-year-old artist Mitchell Morton is a founding member of the Onslow Outdoor Painters Society, much better known as OOPS.After all, “oops” might be the perfect term to describe how Morton feels about the astonishing success that has come his way since he evolved from painting houses to painting his increasingly popular, valuable and well-known works of art.
“I’m as amazed at it as anybody else,” said Morton, whose painting of a pelican on the stern of a boat at Phillips Seafood in Swansboro recently won him the Onslow Art Society’s Best Artist award from Images 2011. “I’m like, ‘Gosh, how did this happen?’ There weren’t art classes when I was in school, and I grew up in a neighborhood where most people worked on cars, things like that. I’ve really been kind of intimidated by this (success).”
And Morton’s success hasn’t been confined to Onslow County. His works – a combination of realism with what he concedes is a hint of impressionism inspired by masters like Monet and Renoir – have won recognition all over the region. He’s had a painting in the permanent collection in the Randall Library at UNC-Wilmington since 2008, and has others in private collections all over North Carolina and in many other states.
Another painting took second place in the prestigious Bank of the Arts Show in New Bern in 2010. He won a best in show at Coastal Carolina Community College in 2009, won the same Onslow Art Society contest and finished second in the Beaufort Fine Art Show that same year. Last year, he was asked to donate a work to the Carolina Chamber Music Festival. Some of his works have sold for upwards of $2,000, and his paintings are in, among others, the Tidewater Gallery in Swansboro and the Art Works Gallery in New Bern.
Not bad for a down-to-earth guy, with no formal training, who just started doing this in 2007.
“Growing up, when I was little, I started drawing and stuff probably as soon as I could get to the wall with a crayon, I guess, and right away I was pretty good at carving things, little animals, out of bars of soap,” said Morton, who was born and grew up in Swansboro and graduated from Swansboro High School in 1966. “But I never really got into it.”
Instead, like many people who grew up near the White Oak River, Morton worked on the water a lot, on shrimp trawlers, pulling nets and in fish houses. Eventually, his predilection toward paint took him into a career as a house painter; he owned and operated Morton’s Painting for years.
But all along, people knew he could paint more than just the interior and exterior of houses. He painted still lifes for pleasure, so many of them that his wife, Penny, eventually started urging him to do something with them “because the house got full of ’em.”
For a time, Morton served as a caregiver for his mother. But when she passed away at age 99, and the couple’s children had moved out of the house, he had more time. Penny’s urgings finally prevailed and he started, tentatively at first, entering shows. Success, to his surprise, was almost instant.
“I always kind of felt like I could do it,” Morton said. “But it took that motivation, that urging, to get me to do it, and to keep at it, and to develop whatever talent I had. I just kept at it, kept looking at other people’s work and learning more and more, figuring out how they handled different situations and materials.
“It’s like learning the guitar or anything else. If you maybe have a little bit of natural ability, a little talent, the more you do it the more you learn about styles and the better you get. Eventually you develop your own style.”
Morton’s subject matter is certainly varied. Although he leans toward water-oriented works – quiet, secluded areas of Queens Creek, where he often fishes, are among his favorite settings – he’s won awards for works that range from volleyball (his granddaughter is in a painting he did called “I Got It” that came from a Swansboro High School state playoff match) to portraits (his wife’s grandfather Palmer Holland is the subject of “r-Ember’-ing”). The latter, the second-prize winner at the New Bern Bank of the Arts show, depicts Holland poking at a fire in a woodstove in his barn, which was sort of his “escape” place at the family home near the Fairway Restaurant off NC 58.
Ideas, Morton said, can come from almost anywhere. The pelican painting came from a photo taken by local resident Jason Denny.
“There was just something about it, something unique that stayed with me after I saw the photo,” Morton said. “We all harbor a lot of thoughts. I like to say my brain is just a junkyard of ideas. You see something and you kind of stick it away and think, well, I might want to do something with that someday. The photo had really caught my attention, so I thought maybe the painting would catch some attention, too.”
Pelicans also had been on his mind a lot, because so many had been turning up dead in local waters for reasons not entirely clear. And the commercial fishing industry, is also, in a real sense, threatened. A germ of an idea became a gem.
Recently, Morton said, he was fishing around for ideas in downtown New Bern, one of eastern North Carolina’s prime cultural centers, when a really large man in a bright red shirt rode by on a small Harley motorcycle. Then he rode by again, and again. Eventually, Morton said, “I just snapped a shot. Again, there was just something about it that stayed with me. I guess it’s just that he looked too big for the bike. So I painted it and called it “Whopper on a Chopper. It’s hasn’t sold yet, but it’s gotten more comments than almost anything I have done. I live in fear of him finding out I did it. But I did shoot it (the picture) from behind, and he had a helmet on.”
He also likes to look for contrasts – between the old and the new, for example, or the large and the small. That’s fairly easy to do in coastal North Carolina, which in recent years has been undergoing rapid transformations in building styles and land-uses: fish houses giving way to modern office buildings or condos, mansions going up beside bungalows. Like many artists, Morton often finds himself drawn to things that are disappearing; it’s an urge to visually preserve picturesque scenes for posterity, to record places that once served as gathering places and were important in people’s lives, such as general stores or the aforementioned fish houses.
It is hard for Morton to say how long it takes him to do an “average” painting. For one thing, there’s no “average” painting, because each one is unique. Sometimes, he said it might take only two to three hours. Others might take eight hours or more. But, although he “works” at his art every day, the length of time he devotes to it varies widely, from a few minutes to hours.
And paintings, he said, are in a sense a collaborative effort. Artists in OOPS, he said, get together and critique each other’s works in progress, sometimes suggesting changes. Sometimes those suggestions result in revisions, sometimes they don’t. For example, Morton said, some said the award-winning pelican painting needed the bird’s head a little to the left, off-center, with more of a curving line leading the viewer down to the bird, the main subject. He tried it that way, and although that might have followed the unwritten “laws” of art a little more precisely, he didn’t like it as much.
Those closest to the artist often offer critiques – in Morton’s case, his wife, Penny. She might, for example, look at a painting and simply say “‘I don’t like it,’ or ‘What the heck is that over there?’” he said.
Sometimes those kinds of criticisms can shape a painting’s final version. But Morton conceded, in the end, an artist really paints to please himself, not others.
And, about those “laws” … Morton, being completely self-taught, for many years didn’t really know there were any. As he’s acquired more formal art knowledge, he knows more about them. But, he said, “You sort of need to know them” so you can break them, or least bend them.
Many people, Morton said, think color is the primary concern for a painter, but for him, at least, it’s among the least important factors when actually composing the picture. More important to him are the “values” of the colors, the lightness or darkness that give solidity and depth to the objects.
“Values” can be produced not only by the colors and hues, but also by techniques, such as stippling or hatching. And changes in value – whether sudden or gradual – can help the artist more fully express the idea he’s trying to get across.
Thus, a painting might look better, or more “real,” if an object in it is a completely different color than the object in real life or in a photo.
For example, Morton noted that there was no purple at all in the room in which he painted Holland in “r-Ember’-ing.” Yet the painting is largely shades of purple; part of the beauty is the contrast between the oranges in the wood stove and on the man’s face and those purples in the background. Sometimes, Morton said, he’ll photograph a painting in black and white to get a better feel for those important “values.”
Music is also important when he’s painting. For example, Morton said he did the award-winning volleyball match while listening to a rock radio station “as loud as I could stand it,” while more contemplative paintings, say the ones of Queens Creek, usually take shape to quieter music. For the painting donated to the Chamber Music Festival, he was asked, specifically, to paint to a specific classical music piece composed by French master Claude Debussy. He knew very little about classical chamber music, but said the mood did inspire the result. Whatever the music, he said it shows up in the “rhythm” of the painting.
Another factor in Morton’s art, he said, is his long background in painting houses.
“Because of that, I think, I don’t ‘fear’ the paint,” he said. “Paint is paint. Some people are intimidated by it, intimidated by putting it on. I’m not.”
In the end, no artist can be sure of all the elements that influence a work. And sometimes, Morton said, it’s a lot simpler than one might think. One of his favorite quotes came from a decoy carver, who had laboriously carved a block of wood into a picture-perfect duck.
“He said, ‘I just cut away everything that wasn’t a duck,’” Morton said. “I really liked that. I feel like that’s kind of what I do sometimes with painting, like what I did with those bars of soap when I was little.”
“I’m as amazed at it as anybody else,” said Morton, whose painting of a pelican on the stern of a boat at Phillips Seafood in Swansboro recently won him the Onslow Art Society’s Best Artist award from Images 2011. “I’m like, ‘Gosh, how did this happen?’ There weren’t art classes when I was in school, and I grew up in a neighborhood where most people worked on cars, things like that. I’ve really been kind of intimidated by this (success).”
And Morton’s success hasn’t been confined to Onslow County. His works – a combination of realism with what he concedes is a hint of impressionism inspired by masters like Monet and Renoir – have won recognition all over the region. He’s had a painting in the permanent collection in the Randall Library at UNC-Wilmington since 2008, and has others in private collections all over North Carolina and in many other states.
Another painting took second place in the prestigious Bank of the Arts Show in New Bern in 2010. He won a best in show at Coastal Carolina Community College in 2009, won the same Onslow Art Society contest and finished second in the Beaufort Fine Art Show that same year. Last year, he was asked to donate a work to the Carolina Chamber Music Festival. Some of his works have sold for upwards of $2,000, and his paintings are in, among others, the Tidewater Gallery in Swansboro and the Art Works Gallery in New Bern.
Not bad for a down-to-earth guy, with no formal training, who just started doing this in 2007.
“Growing up, when I was little, I started drawing and stuff probably as soon as I could get to the wall with a crayon, I guess, and right away I was pretty good at carving things, little animals, out of bars of soap,” said Morton, who was born and grew up in Swansboro and graduated from Swansboro High School in 1966. “But I never really got into it.”
Instead, like many people who grew up near the White Oak River, Morton worked on the water a lot, on shrimp trawlers, pulling nets and in fish houses. Eventually, his predilection toward paint took him into a career as a house painter; he owned and operated Morton’s Painting for years.
But all along, people knew he could paint more than just the interior and exterior of houses. He painted still lifes for pleasure, so many of them that his wife, Penny, eventually started urging him to do something with them “because the house got full of ’em.”
For a time, Morton served as a caregiver for his mother. But when she passed away at age 99, and the couple’s children had moved out of the house, he had more time. Penny’s urgings finally prevailed and he started, tentatively at first, entering shows. Success, to his surprise, was almost instant.
“I always kind of felt like I could do it,” Morton said. “But it took that motivation, that urging, to get me to do it, and to keep at it, and to develop whatever talent I had. I just kept at it, kept looking at other people’s work and learning more and more, figuring out how they handled different situations and materials.
“It’s like learning the guitar or anything else. If you maybe have a little bit of natural ability, a little talent, the more you do it the more you learn about styles and the better you get. Eventually you develop your own style.”
Morton’s subject matter is certainly varied. Although he leans toward water-oriented works – quiet, secluded areas of Queens Creek, where he often fishes, are among his favorite settings – he’s won awards for works that range from volleyball (his granddaughter is in a painting he did called “I Got It” that came from a Swansboro High School state playoff match) to portraits (his wife’s grandfather Palmer Holland is the subject of “r-Ember’-ing”). The latter, the second-prize winner at the New Bern Bank of the Arts show, depicts Holland poking at a fire in a woodstove in his barn, which was sort of his “escape” place at the family home near the Fairway Restaurant off NC 58.
Ideas, Morton said, can come from almost anywhere. The pelican painting came from a photo taken by local resident Jason Denny.
“There was just something about it, something unique that stayed with me after I saw the photo,” Morton said. “We all harbor a lot of thoughts. I like to say my brain is just a junkyard of ideas. You see something and you kind of stick it away and think, well, I might want to do something with that someday. The photo had really caught my attention, so I thought maybe the painting would catch some attention, too.”
Pelicans also had been on his mind a lot, because so many had been turning up dead in local waters for reasons not entirely clear. And the commercial fishing industry, is also, in a real sense, threatened. A germ of an idea became a gem.
Recently, Morton said, he was fishing around for ideas in downtown New Bern, one of eastern North Carolina’s prime cultural centers, when a really large man in a bright red shirt rode by on a small Harley motorcycle. Then he rode by again, and again. Eventually, Morton said, “I just snapped a shot. Again, there was just something about it that stayed with me. I guess it’s just that he looked too big for the bike. So I painted it and called it “Whopper on a Chopper. It’s hasn’t sold yet, but it’s gotten more comments than almost anything I have done. I live in fear of him finding out I did it. But I did shoot it (the picture) from behind, and he had a helmet on.”
He also likes to look for contrasts – between the old and the new, for example, or the large and the small. That’s fairly easy to do in coastal North Carolina, which in recent years has been undergoing rapid transformations in building styles and land-uses: fish houses giving way to modern office buildings or condos, mansions going up beside bungalows. Like many artists, Morton often finds himself drawn to things that are disappearing; it’s an urge to visually preserve picturesque scenes for posterity, to record places that once served as gathering places and were important in people’s lives, such as general stores or the aforementioned fish houses.
It is hard for Morton to say how long it takes him to do an “average” painting. For one thing, there’s no “average” painting, because each one is unique. Sometimes, he said it might take only two to three hours. Others might take eight hours or more. But, although he “works” at his art every day, the length of time he devotes to it varies widely, from a few minutes to hours.
And paintings, he said, are in a sense a collaborative effort. Artists in OOPS, he said, get together and critique each other’s works in progress, sometimes suggesting changes. Sometimes those suggestions result in revisions, sometimes they don’t. For example, Morton said, some said the award-winning pelican painting needed the bird’s head a little to the left, off-center, with more of a curving line leading the viewer down to the bird, the main subject. He tried it that way, and although that might have followed the unwritten “laws” of art a little more precisely, he didn’t like it as much.
Those closest to the artist often offer critiques – in Morton’s case, his wife, Penny. She might, for example, look at a painting and simply say “‘I don’t like it,’ or ‘What the heck is that over there?’” he said.
Sometimes those kinds of criticisms can shape a painting’s final version. But Morton conceded, in the end, an artist really paints to please himself, not others.
And, about those “laws” … Morton, being completely self-taught, for many years didn’t really know there were any. As he’s acquired more formal art knowledge, he knows more about them. But, he said, “You sort of need to know them” so you can break them, or least bend them.
Many people, Morton said, think color is the primary concern for a painter, but for him, at least, it’s among the least important factors when actually composing the picture. More important to him are the “values” of the colors, the lightness or darkness that give solidity and depth to the objects.
“Values” can be produced not only by the colors and hues, but also by techniques, such as stippling or hatching. And changes in value – whether sudden or gradual – can help the artist more fully express the idea he’s trying to get across.
Thus, a painting might look better, or more “real,” if an object in it is a completely different color than the object in real life or in a photo.
For example, Morton noted that there was no purple at all in the room in which he painted Holland in “r-Ember’-ing.” Yet the painting is largely shades of purple; part of the beauty is the contrast between the oranges in the wood stove and on the man’s face and those purples in the background. Sometimes, Morton said, he’ll photograph a painting in black and white to get a better feel for those important “values.”
Music is also important when he’s painting. For example, Morton said he did the award-winning volleyball match while listening to a rock radio station “as loud as I could stand it,” while more contemplative paintings, say the ones of Queens Creek, usually take shape to quieter music. For the painting donated to the Chamber Music Festival, he was asked, specifically, to paint to a specific classical music piece composed by French master Claude Debussy. He knew very little about classical chamber music, but said the mood did inspire the result. Whatever the music, he said it shows up in the “rhythm” of the painting.
Another factor in Morton’s art, he said, is his long background in painting houses.
“Because of that, I think, I don’t ‘fear’ the paint,” he said. “Paint is paint. Some people are intimidated by it, intimidated by putting it on. I’m not.”
In the end, no artist can be sure of all the elements that influence a work. And sometimes, Morton said, it’s a lot simpler than one might think. One of his favorite quotes came from a decoy carver, who had laboriously carved a block of wood into a picture-perfect duck.
“He said, ‘I just cut away everything that wasn’t a duck,’” Morton said. “I really liked that. I feel like that’s kind of what I do sometimes with painting, like what I did with those bars of soap when I was little.”
