Painter and Pastel Artist, Iva Morris lives and works in the small farming town of Las Nutrias, New Mexico. Her work can be found in Public, Private, and Museum Collections throughout the US. Ms. Morris is an Art Teacher, providing workshops in pastel and oil painting. She participated in the Artist in Residence Program, painting murals with children around the State of New Mexico. Morris has been making art for most of her life, showing locally and nationally, winning awards for her prints, pastels and oil paintings. She is a member of the Pastel Society of America and the Pastel Society of New Mexico. Her work can be found at Studio 107-B in Taos, NM and at Weems Fine Art in Albuquerque, NM.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My paintings have often been described as narrative realism; they do tell a story, and they are painted in a realistic way.
The stories that they depict are about my life: as a Teacher, Mother, Wife and Artist. I like to think of them as a series of billboards that reflect social commentary.
From the past several years, I have been working on a series of paintings that deal with both cultural expectations and their visual counterparts. In depicting familiar iconography in unfamiliar ways, I ask the viewer to re-examine both casual and ingrained perceptions. Reality stripped of the comfortable mantle of expectation is both revealing and sad. Humor and whimsy are the pictorial arsenal used to soften the blow.
A comment made by painter Andrew Wyeth pretty much sums up my approach:
“Art is nothing more than the people that you love and the place where you live.”
PASTEL | OIL
I love both media. This is partly because the two have different strengths and encourage different techniques.
Not limiting myself to one medium - nor just one subject - keeps my skills and imagination sharp, and it keeps me fascinated with what I’m doing.
My pastels take a lot less time for me to complete, and I hope that helps to maintain a freshness in my work. A big oil painting can take several months of concentrated interest. After that it is often a relief to finish a pastel in a couple of days.