“Morton paints with a breathless spontaneity. Looking at the superb floral arrangements, the spectator feels the urgency that seems to have pushed the artist to capture the transient beauty of the moment in quick, lush strokes of the brush.”
“Morton’s work is refreshingly free of rhetoric, relying only on rich color, genuine emotion and uncontrived gestures for its appeal. Morton makes each canvas a celebration of the transitory moment, for he knows that color and light never meet the same way in the same place twice.”
“The daubs of color Morton uses to approximate the appearances of things can touch off ambiguities that give a twist to a picture’s subject. This is unpretentious painting you can look at long and hard, even though its pleasures are immediately available.”
“Morton is clearly part of the Bay Area figurative tradition… He uses flourishes of one color or sweeps of another to create an exuberant arrangement... He possesses an ability to cast a strong poetic aura upon flowers, fruit and farmland alike.”
“To experience a Morton painting is to experience the artist’s joy and gratitude in living. In many ways, the paintings he composes are small slices of himself that he gives away as gifts. The subject matter he chooses to paint is familiar, yet Morton manages to compel us into seeing these things in a completely different way. His subjects are simple things that, without our knowing it (or perhaps we do know, and forget) mean everything to us, simply because they are the simple things. During nearly forty years, the whim of critics and the “art market” have waffled, drifting from right to left to right again, from abstract to representational, yet still Morton continues to paint his paintings in the same way, on his own terms. He has remained a successful working artist all these years because his paintings touch us at some root level.He does not paint in a strictly representative style. There are cameras for that. What Morton does is emulate the emotional impact of the scene in visual terms and gently impales it into our hearts, like Cupid’s Arrow. He works in acrylics, using large brushes on paper and canvas, and quite often paints outside, “au plein aire”, in the tradition of the great Impressionists. Geer Morton is truly a free spirit. He paints every day as though it was his first and last, with an enthusiasm for his art that is at the same time both childlike and mature. In the beginning, as children, we see these things with a miraculous awe, then we forget. Morton reminds us.”
