Morgan Motes grew up in Palatka, Florida, and began creating and sharing his work at a young age. In 2021, he graduated from the University Of North Florida with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, with a focus in painting, drawing and printmaking, and a minor in creative writing. He is currently a preparator and art-handler at The Baker Museum at Artis-Naples. In addition to painting, he writes poetry and has released 13 albums.
Statement:
"Morgan Motes's practice is an experiment in affective representation, focusing on the relation between human emotion and the natural world. It is an expressionistic attempt to present a moment in its full affective force, attending to our orientation in the natural and built environment and the minor affects that are often hard to put into words. Landscapes are not landscapes, but heavy breathings in night. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Motes has been exploring universal and particular feelings of emptiness and isolation through the idiom of landscape. The paintings are dark, shy, and hesitant to offer clear interpretations of their content
or motive. They present the world from behind a window, clouded and foreign, but familiar - how an old poem may be remembered, or a broken lyric of a song, abstracted by memory and time." [1]
[1] https://www.morganmotes.com/about