“Morgan’s images display our own felt electricity, the crackling auras and fields
that we know for sure are there, not just from new scientific sensors, but from
the way our bodies so often feel. We are not only stardust,
but wild patterned energy, dust devils swirling through space for just a time.“

— science fiction author, Kim Stanley Robinson

Do you desire a new way to feel?

Do you love the way energy feels? Dances around your body and flows through and around the earth? That is what I show you in my artwork. It can move within and without you. It can energize.

My art practice has always been a kinesthetic one - grounded in the body and its senses and energies - whether painting humans, deities or portraits of the earth.  Coming from dance, movement, ecstatic poetry and music, my work flows onto the paper, often with both hands, using all the body’s knowledge to reveal the underlying sources of energy.  Characters from many races, sexes, sizes and forms appear on my easel, seemingly from deep memory.  Sometimes they are dreamed up by brushes and paint.

And why is this artwork important? We live in a time of much anger and violence, and communication is often disembodied. The disconnect between our selves and the natural world is causing serious problems. We need to come home to our bodies, our animal-ness, our human-ness, our body-temples. 

My lastest book with the fabulous Heather Sanderson! Highly illustrated.

my long career

I have had a long and varied art career -- painting, public art,  environmental work, dance, curating and children's books. I love to paint at least 40 inches high so that when you stand in front of one of my dancers, deities or friends, you can feel their presence, strength and energy. I often surprise myself by who shows up in my studio - a series of paintings like the Body Temples, the Deities (traditional and homemade, numbering 150), and the Wild Women. Each painting starts as a puzzle, a mystery to be solved. Some take an hour, other months. The forces moving onto the paper can flow into you, and all around you. You can easily absorb the love put into these works. 

When I first met  my husband, he asked me what I wanted in a life partner, and I said, “someone to have adventures with”.  Little did I know! I have been fortunate to be able to paint  in many wild places, from Antarctica to Kyrgyzstan, from Central Turkey to high up in the mountains in British Columbia. I was artist-in-residence in Death Valley National Park three times, and out of that art grew my first children’s book Welcome to Death Valley, a Guided Tour of Death Valley National Park, - of course narrated by two ravens. I was artist in residence at Weir Farm National Historic Site, Babayan Cultural Center in Cappadocia, Hanksville Elementary School in Utah, the Luminous Bodies Residency at Artscape Gibraltar Point in Toronto. I had a blast being a teaching artist-in-residence at the Omega Institute for 14 years, and I was honored to teach “Creating Your Own Deity” at the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art and at the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors.  I  taught Drawing Belly Dance at the Art Students League of New York, working with some fabulous dancers. (I have studied Belly Dance myself and performed and taught).

For 18 years I was an Expressive Arts Therapist with adults  at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. I gained a true appreciation of all kinds of creativity and the joy a simple project can bring. I realized we humans have spent most of our existence making everything we need, and that we usually made these things with beauty and care.

Sometimes I paint large, usually 8 x 8 feet. My large banner paintings have been featured at Omega’s Woman and Power Conference, Burning Man and the Parliament of World Religions. So you can imagine that often the best part of this whole art journey is meeting  people from all over the world. A funny thing happened when my husband and I had a show at the National Museum of Art of Kyrgyzstan – half way around the world – all the women, young and old, went straight to my work, and all the men were drawn to my husband’s. We have often painted side by side with very different visions of the same place! It has been great to have a partner in all this!

Photos of shows including Kyrgyzstan included here!