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| Mitchell Morton, Artist |
By BRAD RICH
Tideland News Writer
Article HERE...
The accolades keep rolling in for Hubert-based artist Mitchell Morton, as his poster for the 2012 N.C. Seafood Festival has taken the silver medal in a premier international competition.
The acrylic painting, titled “Fruits of the Sea,” won the second-place award in the commemorative poster division of the International Festivals and Events Association’s IFEA/Haas & Wilkerson Pinnacle Awards Competition at the Annual IFEA Convention & Expo.
The competition divides entries into categories depending upon the total budget for the festivals. The seafood festival, held annually in Morehead City the first weekend of October, is in the category for events with budgets of $250,000 to $749,000.
That category is more or less in the middle range. For example, the Time-Warner Barbecue and Blues Festival in Charlotte is in the under-$250,000 classification, while the Kentucky Derby Festival in Louisville is in the over-$1.5 million.
The gold medal winner in Morton’s category was the St. Louis Art Fair, and the bronze medal went to the Cincinnati International Wine Festival.
“They (festival officials) entered it, and I was very pleased to learn that it placed,” Morton said. “They said it was the first time that had happened for the festival. It’s some recognition for me, which is great, but I was really happy that it’s also some good recognition for the festival.”
Morton, a founding member of the Onslow Outdoor Painters Society, better known as OOPS, is a self-taught painter, who in 2007, after years of painting houses for a living and doing art for fun, began to show his works in galleries and enter them in competitions.
His painting of a pelican on the stern of a boat at Phillips Seafood in Swansboro won him the Onslow Art Society’s Best Artist award from Images 2011.
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. 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.
The poster art competition silver medal is his first international recognition. The seafood festival painting, he said, took him two or three days, although he admits most of that time, probably 80 percent of it, was spent “thinking.” That’s normal for a painting, he said.
“You have an idea, and you start on it, then you do a little and think about it some more,” he said. “It’s a process of getting what’s in your head onto the canvas. In this case, I did the boats first, then had to figure out what else to do.
“I had the idea of a plate of seafood, to show the ‘harvest of the sea,’ but the question was how to show that. I thought about doing it in a restaurant, with a lot of people at tables, but I finally decided to just have it on a table that really could be anywhere, outside or just in a quiet room. The idea was to make it more personal. A single platter, I think, just made it more personal, more intimate, so people could connect with it one-to-one.”
The painting didn’t even start out, consciously, as an entry for the seafood festival poster.
“It was kind of in the back of my mind, but when I was working on it some other people kind of encouraged me to enter it, so I did,” he said.
The IF&EA competition for more than 50 years has recognized outstanding accomplishments and top quality creative, promotional, operational and community outreach programs and materials produced by festivals and events around the world.
It strives for the highest degree of excellence in festival and event promotions and operations, and, according to its website, “has raised the standards and quality of the festivals and events industry to new levels. From events large or small, cities, festivals, chambers, universities, parks and recreation departments, vendors and suppliers, and everything in between, events and promotions of nearly every type and size … have the opportunity to be recognized.”
The international recognition for Morton is another major step for someone who until middle age never thought of himself as a serious artist.
“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,” Morton said in a previous interview, after winning the 2011 Onslow award. “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.”
