Graves was born in Fox Valley, Oregon, United States, on August 28, 1910. He had five elder brothers and two younger siblings. In 1911, a few months after Morris Graves' birth, his family returned to the Seattle area, settling in semi-rural Edmonds, Washington.
Morris Graves is remembered as a moody child, repeatedly ill with pneumonia. He amused himself during recuperation by watching birds and mentally designing gardens. By the time he was 10, he could recognize and identify as many as 40 kinds of wildflowers. This same year he decided to become an artist.
Graves dropped out of high school after his sophomore year. However, in his early twenties, he finished his high school studies in 1932 in Beaumont, Texas, while living with his maternal aunt and uncle.
Along with his brother Russell, Graves made three trips to East Asia between 1928 and 1930. He visited all the major Asian ports as a steamship hand for the American Mail Line. He spent the summer of 1932 in New Orleans before returning to Seattle. He made his first mark as an artist in 1933, when he presented his works at the Seattle Art Museum's (SAM) Northwest Annual Exhibition, the major regional art event of the year.
In 1934 Morris Graves built a small studio near Edmonds. It burned down in 1935, destroying nearly all of his artworks, as well as his collection of Asian art objects. At the beginning of the 1930s, he began to attend the Buddhist temple in Seattle. There he was introduced to the concept of Zen, and the meditative goal of stilling the mind to raise consciousness.
The Seattle Art Museum organized his first solo show in 1936. About 1937 he turned from oils to tempera or gouache, which he applied to Chinese paper. He joined the WPA Federal Art Project in 1939, but stayed there for only a few months. He then made some of his best-known artworks, including Blind Bird (1940) and Little Known Bird of the Inner Eye (1941). Lubin Petric was one of Graves' usual companions during the time he worked under the WPA, who was at that time the domestic partner of Morris Graves' sister, Celia. When he left the WPA in 1939, he went to the Virgin Islands and to Puerto Rico.
Morris Graves befriended George Nakashima in 1940, an architect who had just returned to Seattle from Japan and set up a furniture workshop. Both of them shared the belief that form should grow from the natural properties of materials. That same year, he started to build a house on his Fidalgo Island property.
In September 1940, Graves was offered a position at the Seattle Art Museum. It was Dr. Richard Fuller's initiative to employ artists for light duties, to provide them with some income while allowing them time to create their paintings. Morris Graves had two weeks on duty at the museum followed by two weeks off, when he worked in his studio. That arrangement continued until 1942.
Morris Graves frequently used a calligraphic style in which delicate white lines appear against a dark background. His art received international recognition in 1942 when 31 of his works appeared in an exhibition, which took place at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Thereafter Graves’s watercolors and oil paintings were highly sought after by numerous collectors. Graves had his first one-man show the same year at the Willard Gallery, in New York. He participated in Three Americans: Weber, Knaths, Graves at the Phillips Memorial Gallery in Washington, D.C.
A 1947 study Morris Graves made of the Asian art in the Honolulu Academy of Art inspired his series of paintings depicting Chinese bronzes made the same year. During 1954-1956 most of Graves's paintings were focused on birds and animals of Ireland. He often intensified his images by making their eyes and beaks larger than in real life, or placing them curiously. In the 1950s, the painter returned to oils, but also painted in watercolor and tempera. Graves left the United States and settled outside Dublin, to escape, as he explained, "the onrush and outrage of machine noise."
In 1965 he moved to Loleta, California, where he bought 25 acres of redwood forest. He hired architect Ibsen Nelsen to design his home which was constructed beside the lake. Morris Graves lived on this property for the remaining 35 years of his life. Inspired by his surroundings, the artist frequently depicted flowers in his later works.
Morris Graves was one of the most outstanding and recognized painters of the 20th century. He won numerous prizes, including the Seattle Art Museum's Northwest Annual Exhibition Award in 1933, and two at the Art Institute of Chicago, in 1947 and 1948.
The Mystic Sons of Morris Graves was a group formed in 1991 by artist Charles Krafft and Larry Reid to honour Graves' works and spirit.
The Morris Graves Museum of Art, located in the restored Carnegie library building in Eureka, California, was named after him; it contains a small collection of his works and much of his personal collection of works by other artists.
Works by Morris Graves are included in the collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Museum of Modern Art (New York City), the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington D.C.), the Figge Art Museum (Davenport, Iowa), the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), the Museum of Northwest Art (La Conner, Washington), among others.
Graves had a deep interest in Zen Buddhism and Daoism. He spent much of his time in Asia and absorbed ideas and iconography related to Zen Buddhism.
Quotations:
"I paint to evolve a changing language of symbols, a language with which to remark upon the qualities of our mysterious capacities, which direct us toward ultimate reality."
"An artist is a prophet and seer, not a paint craftsman or design maker, or reporter or entertainer... the artist has the superiorly searching perception with which that world outside of man's contamination can be penetrated and the truth drawn out from it."
"Such compositions, line and color ideas, such wonders come into my mind and have stuck! - They will this time be dismissed only by being painted out..."
"You must first realize the thing completely in your mind. Then grasp the brush, fix your attention so that you see clearly what you wish to paint; start quickly, move the brush, follow straight what you see before you, as the buzzard swoops down when the hare jumps out. If you hesitate one moment, it is gone."
"The artists of Asia have spiritually realized form, rather than aesthetically invented or imitated form, and from them I have learned that art and nature are mind's Environment within which we can detect the essence of man's Being and Purpose, and from which we can draw clues to guide our journey from partial consciousness to full consciousness."
"I love and in a way need, a private secret place. It's a kind of deep obsession, but I also love to need and be with friends and the two things often need to be together... it's a painful conflict that will never be smoothly resolved."
Graves was a restless person, who couldn't stay long in one place.
Quotes from others about the person
Elizabeth Bayley Willis: "Graves had developed his style from the minute examination of moss, and the study of scaly surfaces of old barns, and used loose painting with a palette knife on coarse absorbent canvas hoping to attain the quality of antiquity of old frescos."
James Washington Jr.: "I think he [Graves] realized that the essence of life lay in simplicity, and he kept testing how far down he could go into that."
