August 10-11, 2012

Here's the next in an ongoing series of Penland Benefit Auction newsletters, featuring artists whose work will be a part of this year's auction. We have invited trustees, staff members, collectors and friends to write about pieces that will be included in the summer 2012 benefit event and to comment on living with the works they have purchased in past auctions.

A few words from Jeff Fleming, director of the Des Moines Art Center , about auction artist Clarence E. Morgan...

  

 
"Here, overlapping, noticeably agitated lines of blue, orange-red, and grey-green sprawl across the picture plane, reminiscent of a forest floor with leaves and organic debris or, conversely, a canopy of forest trees in a composition with no focal point. Or perhaps the image is similar to a chalkboard where its marks and erasures record the process of the final image's creation. Intensity fades and grows; colors push and pull advancing and receding into space that is both shallow and deep. Seemingly, the image could move in all directions - both outwardly and deep into space - indefinitely."

Untitled, 2012, screen print and lithograph on Rives BFK paper, 11 1/2 x 11 1/2 in.

 

"This untitled print from 2012 continues Morgan's ongoing search to find
meaning within orderings of graphic devices. Since the 1970s, Morgan has
used pattern, rhythm, gesture, color, idealized shapes, decoration, and
hybrid forms as the tools of his investigations, each informing his ongoing
search for relevance in abstract imagery. His early layered collages of
found, colored paper and paint as well as his more recent black-and-white
groupings of circles, ovals, and meandering lines, depicted flat,
two-dimensional spaces along with illusions of depth.

Holes through seemingly solid forms provided vistas into layered, whirling
shapes. Forms radiated around one another as if flying in and out of cloud
formations, or through the debris of explosions in the expanding reaches of space and, conversely, in microscopic worlds beyond our vision. This current work extends his ongoing explorations into the nature of abstract art, abstraction's place in the history of painting or mark-making, and its
contribution to visual culture in the 21st century."
                                                                           - Jeff Fleming  

 

Clarence Morgan is a painter, teacher, and writer who resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, and his work is included in the collections of the Cleveland Art Museum, Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Art Institute, General Mills, and University of Alabama, among others. He has been awarded a Bush Foundation Artist Fellowship, McKnight Foundation Artist Fellowship, Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, Minnesota State Arts Board Grant, North Carolina Arts Council Visual Artist Fellowship, and a Southern Arts Federation NEA Regional Fellowship. Morgan is a member of the faculty in the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where he is a professor and former chair of the department, and he has taught at Penland many times. 

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Reservations are required. The event often sells out quickly; early reservations are recommended. Reservations will be accepted until available spaces are filled. All ticket purchasers and absentee bidders receive an illustrated catalog in July.

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