Winter Flower

Morris Graves, who lived most his life in the Pacific Northwest, achieved recognition in the 1940s for his depictions of birds and flowers imbued with a sense of inwardness and spirituality. Like his friends John Cage and Mark Tobey--both also from the West Coast--he was inspired by Zen Buddhism and Asian art and philosophy. The present drawing relates to a series of works on the theme of hibernation that Graves did while living in Ireland in 1954 and in which animals curl up within concentric orbs. The single flower depicted here is at once realistic in its delicate rendering and otherworldly in its isolation at the center of a luminous circle of vegetation.