HARRISTON – A local realism artist is being recognized for her talents in the 17th International Art Renewal Centre (ARC) Salon Competition based in New York.
Diane Morgan is a mother, wife, friend and now, after several years of pushing aside her aspirations, a painter. Morgan honed her skills by taking art classes and graduating from the Toronto Academy of Realist Arts.
“I would say it would be the equivalent of the Olympics,” Morgan told the Advertiser referring to the ARC competition.
The international contest received over 5,000 entries from over 87 countries. Approximately 40 per cent or 1,970 works were selected as semi-finalists.
Morgan has not just one of those accepted submissions, but two.
This year she decided to submit two works of art: a piece of still life and a self portrait.
“Because [the contest is] strictly realism, it really narrows down a lot of people who could or would enter it,” she noted.
According to ARC officials and Morgan, the contest is known for being the “most prestigious realist art competition in the Americas and perhaps the world.”
Her work
Ready for Pie is one of the oil paintings Morgan created, it took her four to five months to complete and is personalized to herself.
“Everything in that painting is a part of me,” she said.
“The tea towel, the tablecloth were wedding gifts that I got, the apple corer is my apple corer that I use all the time to make apple pie,” added Morgan.
“The bowl is my bowl that I use in my kitchen all the time … same with the wooden spoon.”
All the items in her painting are things she uses in her everyday life; even the image’s background has meaning.
When she bought her house in Harriston with her husband 25 years ago, it came with another smaller building in the backyard.
One day while cleaning the building, her husband found an old door shoved into the attic.
“It’s got that crackled-paint patina and it’s just really cool looking,” she said.
One side of the door had a rustic wooden feel and the other was crackled with white paint.
Although the white side was used for her pie painting, the wooden side can be seen in a “sister painting.”
Her second entry, Self Portrait In The Highlands, was used for her final piece while she was still in school.
“We had gone on a trip back to Scotland because that’s where I’m from,” Morgan explained.
While on her trip she visited her cousin’s son’s memorial. He was 14 years old and passed away from a brain tumour.
While taking in the moment, she looked out across a lake to the hills nearby, simply admiring the scenery.
“We were standing there looking across and I took these photos because it was just spectacular, and so I said, ‘I want to use that in the background,’” Morgan said.
The painting pays homage to her heritage, but it also dives into a deeper issue.
“When I started to look at paintings of the 1800s or 1700s a lot of the Scottish portraits, or any of the portraits of that area was always men,” she noted.
“Women weren’t considered good enough to be subject matter for portraits.”
Those women who were captured in a painting were sitting “very proper inside at a table or sitting there dead straight,” Morgan stated.
Her goal was to convey how women are no longer confined anymore.
“Women have much more control, much more power over ourselves, our lives and everything else,” she said.
Even her pose in the painting was chosen strategically to show “strength and power.”
“A lot of the things I’ll paint might be antique subject matter, but the way I’ve done them in the still life is kind of contemporary looking,” she noted.
Beating the odds
Although Morgan found her passion later in life, there were glimpses of it from a young age.
She was around six years old when she saw her first oil painting and quickly “fell in love with it.
“It was a little skate girl in a skating costume … I thought ‘wow it must be so freeing to be able to paint something like that with just a brush, some paint and a canvas’ … I was awed by that,” she said.
She spent her whole life saying, “I wish I could do that.”
When she reached high school and started Grade 9 art, she was thrilled.
“I started painting a little and when I asked my teacher for help, she laughed at me and told me not even to bother finishing,” she said.
Morgan stopped attending her class after that.
Then, 11 years ago, after working in various industries, she found herself out of work. That was the moment she decided to learn how to paint.
“I wasn’t going to let anybody at that point in my life tell me I can’t do it. I’m doing it,” she said.
Finalists
Now Morgan waits for the second roster to be released by the ARC.
The finalists will be announced on Nov. 20, with honourable mentions and winners to follow on Jan. 6.
The competition offers over $100,000 in cash awards and international recognition through partnerships with magazines, galleries, museum exhibitions and a “strong” online presence, stated ARC officials.
Morgan’s pie painting was sold and is now part of the permanent collection at the Wellington County Museum and Archives.
“That’s one of the things that’s kind of nice about this competition, is you don’t have to physically still have the painting,” she added.
If she wins the Best of Show award Morgan will receive $25,000 U.S.
This year, the semi-finalists will not only be displayed on the ARC website at artrenewal.org, but will also be included in the Lunar Codex, which is a set of time capsules launched on three NASA-related missions, including the work of 7,000 creatives.
It will be the “first significant placement of contemporary arts” on the Moon in 50 years, stated ARC officials.
“Even just to make it as a semi-finalist is a big deal especially for somebody from a small town like myself who isn’t on the world stage,” she said.
