2 minute read
In Conversation: Eliza Naranjo Morse
BY ANN E. MARSHALL | DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH
Eliza Naranjo Morse created Portrait of Ultimate Happiness in 2009, when she was 29. In 2011, she wrote an extended statement about the mixedmedia artwork and the process from which it grew. Just recently, 12 years after the deer’s creation and 10 years after her statement, I spoke with Naranjo Morse about her current thoughts given the passage of time and the current circumstances we find ourselves in.
The Heard’s artwork is a gift of David and Sara Lieberman, who purchased it at a Santa Fe Rotary Foundation for the Arts auction. Eliza Naranjo Morse recalled that her mother, artist Nora Naranjo Morse, was being honored at the event, and she wanted to lend her support.
The deer figure in the Heard’s artwork made its first appearance when Eliza Naranjo Morse, a 2003 graduate of Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., was taking a Saturday-morning figure drawing class at a local community college. An assignment to draw a self-portrait was initially proving challenging; as she said, “Looking at self can be a difficult thing.” She chose instead to look at the artist version of herself, as the making of the art had become a source of happiness. In her 2011 statement, Naranjo Morse said, “I did not tire of the deer!” The Heard’s deer is young, with the beetcolored spots of a fawn, but with considerable antlers. Looking at the piece, she remarked, “My goodness, I really went to town on those antlers!” In future works, she continued to draw and paint the figure, playing with color and micaceous clay, and cutting holes in the surface. Looking back on her statement, she said she found it “endearing” that, at the time, she felt funny about making repeated versions of the deer, but now she recognizes that this is where the creativity comes from.
“I’m happy when I’m comfortable and fluid making work,” Naranjo Morse said. “There is a feeling of traveling through space on a pilgrimage. At the time I didn’t realize that was what I was doing. This deer was on its way.” She was beginning to uncover a long thread that she is still following—a theme in the life she has chosen to pursue with “pilgrimage” as a recurring subject.
In our discussion, Naranjo Morse wanted to celebrate patronage, such as the Liebermans’, which offers the artist time for exploration and creative uncovering. She recognizes how fortunate she and her mother have been, and in turn she wants to support young artists, as she sees the “incredible social value in creative thoughts. Every voice is valuable.”
She also has found that the value systems Indigenous persons carry with them are of importance in the process of human experience as we try to navigate a global, commodified western culture. Engaging with the Indigenous perspective is a way to carry various forms of thinking into our future, and that kind of effort and thought she finds endlessly valuable. It is remembering the future.
