Strasburg, PA

Sarah McRae Morton

http://www.mcraemorton.com

First Flight was begun during tobacco harvesting season in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.  It was painted in a baking hay loft while neighbors decked their rafters with the skins of tobacco.  The composition was finished seasons later after the crop was cashed and smoked, ribbons of the may pole were tattered, foals born, silos filled.  The birds – a cloud of fins, sails, dots and dashes – had gone south again.  Its scale – traditionally reserved for religious or history painting – is a reflection of McRae Morton’s American culture.  The identity of the figures as Amish, however, is disguised.  Vignettes allude to paintings by Gustave Millet, Vincent Van Gogh, Winslow Homer, and Andrew Wyeth.  

The Suspension of Disbelief is one painting from a series called “The Bellows of the Bear” which draws on McRae Morton’s family history.  McRae Morton reconstructs and retells stories of her ancestors whose search for work or rest, adventure or belonging took them across oceans, over mountain passes, into the bellies of coal mines, and through the unknown wilds of the West.  McRae Morton intertwines the narrative of her lineage with passages from American art’s past to situate each character in a time and place that has been committed to history.  For The Suspension of Disbelief, McRae Morton cast the bear who is tethered to a boat in George Caleb Bingham’s “Fur Traders Descending the Missouri.”  

The Pennsylvania Convention Center acquired two of Sarah McRae Morton’s artworks, First Flight and The Suspension of Disbelief.  The frames for both paintings were hand made by a Lancaster County Cabinetmaker and are crafted of walnut from a tree that fell on the property of McRae Morton’s father’s childhood home in West Virginia.