Art & Creativity Quote by Morris Graves

Graves frames painting less as picture-making than as an attempted dialect: a “changing language of symbols” that keeps slipping out of any fixed dictionary. That word “changing” is doing quiet heavy lifting. It rejects the idea that symbols can be mastered once and for all; whatever the painting means has to stay alive, responsive, a little unstable. In a century that watched photography eclipse realism and modernism dismantle old narratives, Graves positions the canvas as a site where meaning is revised rather than declared.

The subtext is almost devotional, but not doctrinal. He’s wary of naming the destination too cleanly. “Mysterious capacities” suggests intuition, perception, maybe even spiritual longing - forces in us that feel real yet resist measurement. He’s not selling a message; he’s proposing a method: symbols as instruments for noticing what usually hides beneath the rational surface. The phrase “remark upon” is modest and telling. Graves isn’t claiming access to “ultimate reality” the way a prophet might. He’s marking its presence indirectly, like a naturalist describing traces.

Context matters: Graves, associated with the Northwest School, built a vocabulary of birds, flowers, and spare forms that reads as nature study and private iconography at once. In postwar America, when abstraction often came packaged as bravado or theory, his aim feels almost countercultural: to use modern painting’s freedom not for noise, but for attunement. The intent is to make a symbolic weather system - images that can’t prove transcendence, but can make you feel its pressure.