BART J. MORSE

Bart Morse was born in 1938, near Salt Lake City, Utah. He grew up in a rural setting on one of the broad benches known as Poverty Flat. Located only a few miles from the mouth of Little Cottonwood Canyon, the Labrum farm where Bart was raised was originally homesteaded in the late nineteenth century. The Patriarch of the clan, Thomas Labrum, cut the trees and hauled them from the canyon down to his eighty-acre farm on the bench. The log cabin he built remained standing for nearly 100 years and served as Bart¿s home until he graduated from Jordan High School. It was like many other farms common to pioneer Utah. Huge cottonwood trees lined the ditches. Fields of sage and jagger grass lay interspersed with hay fields and large truck gardens. Junked cars and overgrown orchards were intersperced with falling down chicken coops, fences and granaries. It was earthy and rough and a place where a boy could think and explore.

Although the beautiful Wasatch mountains and storage buildings full of junk provided visual interest to Morse, it was only as an adult in the mid-1970s that he rediscovered these sources as subject matter for his art work. This was partially because his high school art teacher, the influential regional artist Don Olsen, encouraged his students to paint in the abstract expressionist style and was said to ¿hate landscape painting. Morse continued his art studies at Brigham Young University and during his undergraduate years Morse married Leslie Jean Frey. After completing a Bachelor degree in 1962, they moved to Seattle where Morse obtained a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Washington in 1964. He lectured at the University of Washington, and held short term teaching contracts at Grinnell College and Portland State University before becoming a member of the University of Arizona Art Department in 1970.

Bart lived and worked in Southern Arizona until his retirement in 2002. As an avid outdoorsman, his work reflects the many backpacking trips and hikes that he has taken in Arizona and Utah. His particular interest in Petroglyphs, rock art and the landscape has greatly influenced him as an artist and can be seen in the many works presented in the gallery of this website.

Bart Morse continues to work in the Oregon, where he now finds the landscape of the Oregon coast to be his inspiration.

From website: http://www.bartmorse.com/biography.htm