24
TAZEWELL MORTON IN LIVING COLORS
AUBURN / OPELIKA, AL JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2018
FEATURE TAZEWELL MORTON
TAZEWELL MORTON HAS WORKED AS AN ARTIST ALL OVER THE COUNTRY. BUT HE’S ALWAYS BEEN AN AUBURN MAN. FROM ATTENDING AUBURN UNIVERSITY, TO HIS TIME AS A PROFESSOR AT AUBURN, TO CHOOSING AUBURN AS THE LOCATION FOR HIS RETIREMENT, THE AREA HAS BEEN A COMMON THEME IN HIS LIFE AND HAS INSPIRED COUNTLESS WORKS FROM THIS ECLECTIC CREATOR. HE HAS A LONG AND PROLIFIC CAREER IN THE ARTS BEHIND HIM, AND HIS RETIREMENT IS IN NAME ONLY: THIS CELEBRATED AUBURN RESIDENT CONTINUES TO PRODUCE STUNNING AND UNIQUE ART TO THIS VERY DAY.
those years; especially since the hurricane [referring to Hurricane Katrina in 2005]. It’s very different than when I grew up” Taz recollects. Coupled with a great description of the geography and changes to the area by his wife, Taz gives a sense of just how small the Gulfport area was in his youth. He spent a lot of time in his young life enjoying the culture of the Gulf Coast, from the beaches to the lifestyles of fishing and crabbing that permeate the area; these themes would later inspire some of his artwork. He also played football for his schools. While he was in high school, Taz met and began dating Ann Hunt through mutual friends, the woman that would one day become his wife. Ann recalls “He lived maybe four houses down from my best friend. She’s still a good friend of ours today, and she had brothers that Taz was friends with. It was only natural that we were going to meet.” Taz and Ann have been married for almost 60 years and have many children and grandchildren.
oming off the Christmas holiday, Tazewell “Taz” Morton has put a great deal of work into the medium of ceramics. In the local bank where we conduct our first interview with Taz and his wife Ann, the branch manager Dana shows off a piece on her desk. It’s a stylized angel, with rounded edges and a deft painting scheme on a sturdily crafted brass-colored stand. “An original Taz!” Dana exclaims cheerfully, showing off the angel as Taz gracefully listens to our praise of the piece. An Auburn alumni and former professor, a prolific and accolade-laden artist, and a distinguished career full of massive achievements, Taz shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon. Even at 82 years old and well into retirement from the standard 9-to-5 business world, Taz continues to produce unique artistic creations with surprising volume.
In his senior year of high school, Taz was mulling over college choices at his school’s career day. He considered the attending schools and spoke to representatives, expressing interest in three schools. The schools were The University of Alabama, The University of Southern Mississippi, and by chance, Auburn (at the time known as Alabama Polytechnic Institute,
Tazewell Morton was born in Birmingham, Alabama, but his family moved to the Mississippi Gulf Coast when Taz was a toddler. He grew up in an area now encompassed by the greater Gulfport region. “There’s been a lot of development to the area since
2 SOUTHERN
TAT L E R
only referred to colloquially as “Auburn.”) “Nobody in the area had ever heard of Auburn. We all knew the University of Alabama, but Auburn was small by comparison and at the time focused on agriculture and engineering. If it was known, that’s what it was known for. My father had said, ‘Listen, you’re not going to Southern Mississippi, and you’re not going to Alabama,’” Taz says with a laugh. “So I went to the room where the representative from Auburn was supposed to be. Nobody was in the room except the teacher.” Taz asked the teacher about the representative, and she told him that the man, Mr. Norton, was packing up his fliers in his car due to lack of interest in the school from the students. Tazewell caught Mr. Norton in the parking lot of the school as he was loading his bulletins into the trunk of his car, and took one. “It didn’t take me long after that,” Taz says. With that, the first step of Tazewell Morton’s extensive career was taken. Taz, a man of many funny anecdotes, starts with his first week at Auburn, a week that almost didn’t see completion. “It didn’t take me long to get back to the [Gulf ] coast either,” Taz says. Mrs [Ann] Morton interjects with a laugh at the story, adding “Talk about an about-face!” He tells a humorous story about hitch-hiking home to Gulfport and arriving to see his grandmother rocking in her chair on the front porch. “That didn’t last long,” Taz says with a laugh, recalling how when his parents returned home, they had him back on a train to Auburn. “I’m glad they did,” he recounts with a smile “I don’t have any regrets about Auburn. I don’t even know why I left after that first week at all. There’s just something about Auburn that I wouldn’t want to give up. I’m glad I didn’t.” Taz’s tenure as a student at the school that is now Auburn University saw a level of expansion that we now almost take for granted; Alabama Polytechnic Institute had been known primarily for agriculture and engineering and was genuinely beginning to expand into the well-rounded and diverse university that it is today. At this small college, Taz found a love of art, so much that it shaped his life and career from then on. Taz mentions that he had no formal training and not much focus in art before attending the university, but by the time he left he had become an avid painter and even had a few awards under his belt. He shows off his very first painting, a hauntingly beautiful and somewhat surreal piece depicting various nautical items; sails, dock railings, water, and other Gulf-inspired objects interposed on a rippling multi-layered canvas. A large letter “H” adorns the top-center of the painting while varying shades of blue shade the raised areas.
3 J A N UARY/ FEBRUARY
2018
I THINK THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IS TO JUST KEEP
FROM WHAT COMES WITHIN
ly. When given the option to choose the type of flag that Ken wanted to take with the mission and place on the moon, he decided wholeheartedly on an Auburn University flag. The monumental task fell to the Art Department, and the Vice President of the University called up none other than Tazewell Morton. Taz recalls his starting source of inspiration for the flag and the ensuing process. “At the time, President Nixon was in China [on a diplomatic foray that would eventually re-open diplomatic and trade relations between China and the U.S.], and the flags were on the cover of every newspaper and magazine. It was big news, and you couldn’t get away from it. Well, I was asked to design a flag and kept seeing that everywhere. I saw it, and was inspired to create my own.”
It’s magnificent and defies simple description, an impressive feat whether done by a person with little formal training or an accomplished artist with many famous pieces to his name. Taz and Ann tell me that the painting won an award at the local state fair the year it was painted.
Taz graduated from Auburn in December 1957 with a B.A.A in fine arts. He married Ann Hunt shortly after in 1958. They kept up their relationship while both were away at separate colleges, he at Auburn and she at Mississippi State College for Women (now known as Mississippi University for Women). They kept in contact via phone and weekend visits to the others’ college or returns to their mutual hometown of Gulfport. Taz went to work shortly after graduating as an artist for the Jackson Brewing Company in New Orleans, a city that would continue to influence his work. In the 1960s, Taz traveled the country in the advertising business, working and creating within an industry during a time when it produced some of its most memorable and iconic work, still remembered to this day. Taz himself won many awards in advertising, including one from the famous Communication Arts magazine. His work in the advertising industry took him all over the country, in a dizzying tiff as one tries to keep up with the names of cities as Taz rattles the names off in a list. “Atlanta, Birmingham, Baton Rouge, back to Mississippi, Boston,” he says quickly, almost as if starting to sing the Johnny Cash song “I’ve Been Everywhere.” Taz did a lot of traveling before tiring of business life and coming into a professor position at the University of Georgia in the early 1970s teaching graphic design. In 1973, Tazewell returned to his alma mater (renamed officially in 1960 to Auburn University) to teach in the Auburn Art Department.
Taz’s Auburn flag is a dual-colored one; orange at the top, blue on the bottom, cut with a line that bisects it horizontally with a stylized blue eagle in the top-left corner. Taz’s wife Ann points out the stylized eagle as they show off the flag, “I think it looks more like a dove, but I know it’s supposed to be an eagle. That’s just my interpretation. I think it can be two things at once, like the flag. It can represent Auburn and represent peace at the same time.” The Art Department silk-screened ten flags and sent them along with the Apollo 16 craft. Some flags returned to Earth; Tazewell and others involved with the spacecraft flight were given the remainder of the flags as keepsakes for their part in the historic mission.
Taz moved around more in his career as a professor, finding his way to a position as Head of Graphic Design at an institution in New Orleans in the early 1980s. Since then, Taz has returned to Auburn and worked as a commercial artist and illustrator, as well freelance work. During that time, he has never stopped created paintings, drawings, sketches, watercolors, and sculptures. His work graces galleries all over the southeast and elsewhere, as well as many private collections. Taz has a fundamental and centered view of the creation of art, and he advocated creators to branch out with sellers instead of focusing on creating art specifically with commercial appeal in mind. “Ideally, when you sell a painting, you use the money to buy more
While teaching at Auburn, Taz had the opportunity and pleasure to train up the next generation of aspiring painters, sculptors, and designers. He regales the interviewer with countless stories of former students and colleagues, each told with the ironic wit and keen perspective that is uniquely Taz. It’s here that he would find a one-of-a-kind project that sent him beyond the bounds of his regular work, as well as beyond the planet Earth. In 1972, the Apollo 16 mission to the moon was kicking off amid an exhilarating time in space travel. On board would be an astronaut that claimed Auburn as his alma mater, a man by the name of Ken Matting-
5 J A N UARY/ FEBRUARY
2018
THINK ART
Mr. Morton relaxing in his art studio. Contemplating what to create next.
canvasses to create more paintings, or more sculpting material, clay, paints, what have you,” he pontificates. “While you need to eat and have a roof over your head, and live, of course, I think the most important thing is just to keep creating what comes from within, and not focus too much on the commercial aspect. That’s for the business types and agents. But every good artist needs a good businessperson on their side.”
painting, watercolors, framed portraits, pictures of sculptures, and ceramic creations that are all uniquely Taz. In their home, Ann is cheerily sorting through Taz’s work to show, handing over books of photographs, framed paintings, and works from past decades as Taz tells stories. The artworks come quickly, each with their own tale of where Taz was in the country, his life, and his career. He and Ann display a celebratory drawing made for Jimmy Carter’s election victory party in Atlanta; a lively black-and-white work with a label claiming, “I Was There; Democratic
Taz’s art itself is a wonder to behold, and its evolution is stunning as once looks over his long and prolific career. He shows off sketchbooks, painting after
6 S OUTHERN
TAT L E R
National Election Victory Party, November 2, 1976.” Taz says “They gave away 1000 of those at the victory party.” Ann shows another black-and-white drawing of the Fox Theater in Atlanta, one of the longest-running and historic theaters in the city. Next, a watercolor painting of a bayou and gulf animals; a crab, alligator, fish, and crawfish all marching in a line and playing trumpets and saxophones, as if celebrating Mardi Gras. Photographs of sculptures large and small, made of materials from metals to stone and clay. Ann passes over a bronzed painting of people walking on a bridge from
Taz’s childhood, now immortalized on the highway along the same stretch of bridge as a plaque. Eye-catching, abstract paintings with shapes in soft colors on sky blue backgrounds adorn the painting frames. A sketchbook of pen-and-ink drawings that are strange, surreal, and powerfully provocative is handed off to be thumbed through as Taz spins the accompanying yarn for each sketch. A particularly interesting painting that is displayed is a brightly colored Cubist-inspired picture of a man, with the man’s nose seeming to make a “4” on the painting while a curved foreground object
7 J A N UARY/ FEBRUARY
2018
DID YOU KNOW?
As a part of the Apollo 16 mission, Auburn Alum and Astronaut Ken Mattingly flew 10 specially designed Auburn flags to the moon. One of the flags was left on the moon to represent Auburn University. That was Taz’s design.
“43 WAS MY JERSEY NUMBER WHEN I PLAYED FOOTBALL...IT HAS BEEN
PROMINENT IN MY LIFE AND WORK” makes a “3.” The number “43” often makes an appearance in a Tazewell Morton work, whether subtly as in the Cubist painting or directly drawn into the margins or corner. “Forty-three was my jersey number when I played football, and it seems that forty-three has been very important in my life overall. Three is important in literature, art, and religious scripture all over. Four and three are seven, which is also repeated and important. I’ve read the 43rd Psalm.” He pauses. “It’s a good one. It speaks. Four, three, seven and forty-three have all been very important and prominent in my life and work.” Few Taz works slip by without a “43” penciled, painted, or etched into the piece. Taz’s work is undoubtedly unique and difficult to categorize and never are two paintings alike. Taz’s work varies wildly, even amid its commonly held themes. Inspired by his upbringing on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, he often paints leisurely watercolors involving sandy beaches, sunny days, fish, fisherman, shells, and crabs. Other work is reminiscent of the “outsider” folk art of fellow Alabama-born artist Howard Finster, with heavy lines and a stylized viewpoint of what’s seen by the artist’s eyes. Some work is akin to that of the Cubists of the early 20th century; partially interspersing techniques and perspectives employed in works by Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, but depicting scenes that could only be brought to life by Tazewell Morton, and always with his distinct style seen through his unique eye. In addition to gifted eyes and hands, Taz is a remarkable storyteller, often encompassing ideas from his life and how it factors into his work. Each original Taz comes with its own fascinating origin story and a snapshot of his life at the time. Tazewell is a man of humility, wit, an artist’s ironic sense of humor, and observation. He winds up another tale of how another piece came to be, a painting that he calls “The Trinity.” It shows a sandy beach, and two men guiding a fishing net while a third seems to sit in the back, hands raised. “When I was walking along
the beach, I saw these men trawling the net along in the water, and a third man was behind them. It took a bit, but I realized he was guiding them by sight and directing them where to go to get the fish into the net. And when the net came up, it was absolutely full of Spanish mackerel,” Taz recollects. “And I asked the men if I could have one. Went home and cooked it, and it was one of the best meals you could ever eat. And then it hit me. I’d always heard the concept of the Trinity in church; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, but I wouldn’t say I totally got it. That day it clicked; whether it’s me and Ann, or you and a friend, or me and a painting, or the Father and the Son, it’s never just two things or people. There’s always that third ‘something’ that guides us, keeps us on an even keel, or keeps us from being somewhere we don’t need to be. I won’t claim to know what that is because I don’t think it’s the same thing in every situation, but there’s always that third thing. Once I understood the Trinity, I had to make this painting.” He concludes with a laugh, “Because I believe in three...forty-three.” After telling this story in the interview, Taz remarks on what he’s been up to in his retirement. He’s expanded into the medium of ceramics, taking the time to create in a hands-on way and providing the pieces for sale and to friends. Coming off the holiday season, he has a few leftover tree ornaments to show from his most recent foray at the ceramics table. He gives the interviewer an ornament as a keepsake after remembering that the man had said that he liked the piece. Taz shows no signs of stopping or slowing in his retirement and continues to make stunning and distinctly “Tazewell” art well into his 80s. Auburn is proud to have such a creative force as part of its community, as his personality and love of the city are just as vibrant and omnipresent as his storied career and unique stylings in art. There’s plenty of Tazewell Morton art coming, and there is no doubt we’ll see more of the forty-three.
10 J A N UARY/ FEBRUARY
2018
Southern Tatler “The essence of Southern Society”
your CITY, your MAGAZINE e: customer.relations@southerntatler.com l phone: 334.329.1780