Art & Galleries
Artist spotlight: painter Connie L. Morse
By LEANNE HAASE GOEBEL
Connie L. Morse spent 12 years traveling throughout the United States, Canada, and Mexico painting, playing music, exhibiting her art, and teaching workshops with her artist-partner Dave Sime.
Chamisa Road, oil
Eleven years ago the two settled near Durango, Colorado, where, within a few hours' drive, they can be up at 13,000 feet in the Rocky Mountains or down below in the deserts and canyon lands of the Southwest.
Having found their artistic home, Morse and Sime opened the Red Cliff Gallery in Durango where they make and sell their art.
"My dad was a primitive artist," Morse says. "He wrote poetry and painted. He gave me his oil painting set when I was 9 years old and I painted my first landscape. I loved it."
A self-trained artist, Morse sought out guidance from artists she admired.
She studied with Russian colorist and expressive painter Sergei Bongart and says she "owes him a great debt of gratitude for his instruction and inspiration." She has also studied with Harley Brown, Clyde Aspevig, William Reese, and Ned Jacobs.
Morse says the challenge of each canvas never stagnates. Each painting is of a different place and has a different feeling, a different coloring.
But these days she is interested in painting what's right outside her studio door.
"It's so beautiful," she says. "I want to record some of this gorgeous country because it's going fast. Old barns I've painted are gone. It's becoming so polluted. When you have a certain feeling about a place, it comes out in the painting."
A signature member of the American Academy of Women Artists, Morse is also a guest artist with the Plein Air Painters of America and the Rocky Mountain Plein Air Painters.
Issue: July 2009
