Living and painting in light and shadows

By JACOB DORAN / Bigfork Eagle

In the world of India ink, few artists are able to capture the degree of detail, depth of expression or relationship between light and shadow as Bigfork painter Darlene Morgan, whose paintings are often mistaken for black and white photographs.

Morgan was chosen out of 86 artist members as the recipient of the Hockaday Museum of Art's People's Choice Award for 2007 for her India ink painting of two young Blackfeet girls laughing. Having worked from a photograph taken by a friend during a powwow, she named the painting "Double Trouble" and says it remains one of her favorite because of the dramatic combination of light and shadow and the lively personalities of her subjects.

As in all of her paintings, the expressions of the two girls captured in her friend's photograph captivated her imagination, compelling her to attempt to translate and preserve the scene in her inks. In so doing, her own reaction to the children's expressions became the reaction of all who viewed the painting, first at the Hockaday Museum of Art and later at the Bigfork Arts and Cultural Center, where people frequently remarked that they couldn't help but wonder what was the cause of the girls' comical reaction.

Morgan, who paints almost exclusively from her friend's photographs, said she chooses her subjects both for their dramatic lighting and for the kinds of expressions that inspire the viewer to ask questions.

"I like the subjects to invoke some kind of feeling when people see them, something that would get the thought process going about who these people are, what they were looking at in the picture and what might have been going through their minds," she said. "I like unique things, like the little girl scowling or a proud look or maybe a defiant look. What I strive for is to capture their expressions and really portray what is the soul of that person, that certain glint in their eye, and then see the personality of that person take shape."

The fact that most of her subjects are native is also by choice. As a young girl, in third, fourth and fifth grade, she lived on the Flathead Reservation, between Polson and Ronan. Consequently, there were many natives in the school she attended and she became drawn to the native way of life.

When she moved to Bigfork, 41 years ago, she wanted to paint portraitures and couldn't imagine a better subject than the ones she had become so familiar with, since locally there remains a great interest in native culture. She became so fond of native portraitures that she is still painting them more than 40 years later.

"I love painting the Native Americans and other western themes," she said. "The pensive face of a child or the lines of age in an elderly person's face is what I enjoy painting most."

Because of her uncanny ability to reproduce the personality of the subjects in her paintings, people are often surprised to learn that she has never had any formal instruction in art. In fact, she sees her ability as a gift, which like any gift is not something that can be taught in a classroom.

"I have drawn as far back as I can remember," she said. "I can remember sketching with a pencil when I was five years-old. I don't think it's something you can teach. You can enhance it, and I think it's great when people want to take what's already there and make it better. The talent, if it's there, can be developed through hard work."

When one considers that Morgan was raised in a home surrounded by art and family members whose talents were never influenced by formal arts classes or college studies, it's not difficult to see why she has adopted such a view of her own artistic ability and that of others.

Her grandfather's gift was woodcarving. Her brother Marvin was alternately an artist, sculptor, photographer and aspiring architect. Her cousin, Brian Challis, is a sculptor who was commissioned to create two colossal sculptures of Utah Jazz teammates John Stockton and Karl Malone for the Energy Solutions Arena (formerly the Delta Center) in Salt Lake City. Even her mother, Merle Olson, was well-known as a painter in Bigfork for 20 years. All of them, she said, were gifted with natural talent.

Merle was born and raised in Snowflake, Ariz., a small town in the White Mountains, not far from Flagstaff, and later moved to Salt Lake City where Darlene was born. At first, Merle learned the art of repairing one-of-a-kind China and porcelain pieces, as well as museum pieces like Ming vase, which she did so well that people couldn't tell they had ever been damaged. She worked on other art on the side and then threw herself into painting when Marvin died of hemophilia at the age of 22.

For years, Merle painted the landscapes from the slides her son left to her when he died. Afterward, she went into sculpting. Eventually, she came to Montana and started a bronze foundry with her husband Paul in Woods Bay—one of the very first in the Valley. She enjoyed her most productive years of painting in Bigfork and then returned to Utah to paint the southwest, finally coming home to Bigfork to spend the last days of her life under her daughter's care.

It was she who cultivated Darlene's talent. As a child, Darlene drew animals and people's faces, using pencil to add detail and shading. In high school, she found that her friends often asked her to do sketches of them. Later, she began working with oils and dabbled some with pastels.

When she and her parents came to Bigfork, Darlene set up her own paints in her mother's studio and, there, she grew as an artist during her twenties and thirties. Her mother, she says, was her greatest teacher as well as biggest critic, a fact that contributed much to her own success.

"She was brutally honest, and I learned a lot from her," Darlene said. "I felt like I was the greenhorn and she was the seasoned artist. When she died, I lost my best critic."

Her mother was also the one who enabled her to make her mark. Merle had done some India inks while in Salt Lake City and suggested that Darlene might enjoy working with that medium as well. Darlene enjoyed it so much that she chose to specialize in India inks, finding both a niche and a unique market for her paintings, since no one else was working with that medium.

Although she enjoys working with a variety of media, she has stayed with her inks because it is "different from what everyone else does." It is also, however, a difficult and time consuming medium to work with, which she describes as painting in reverse.

"The smallest of details are painstakingly done with a tiny detail brush," she said. "As an example, if you see little white flowers adorning a dress or scarf, that flower has been done in reverse. The white of the flower is the paper, so rather than being painted on, it is painted around. This is much harder than painting it on.

"It's not something that anyone can do. You first have to have pretty good drawing skills, because you can't cover up mistakes with the ink like you can with other mediums."

Knowing the amount of time that goes into every painting, Darlene said she hopes that people buy her paintings for the same reason she buys other artists' paintings, which is simply that they make you want to stop and study them for while, to really take in the images and be inspired by them to feel something.

"I feel strongly that people should buy art that they like," she said. "People should never buy art because it goes with their furniture. They should buy what they enjoy looking at and never tire of, no matter how many times they see it in a day. People should decorate their homes around the art they love, not vice versa."

Although she quit painting for a number of years, while she cared for and later mourned the deaths of her two terminally ill sons, who died due to complications from lifelong hemophilia, having contracted AIDS through blood transfusions. However, she is once again painting full-time and daily pours her energy and creativity into her art, knowing that the pain and experiences of life are what help to make us who we are and shape the legacy we one day leave behind.