Turning the feather around

"In this self-portrait, George Morrison, who calls himself "an artist who happens to be an Indian," tells a personal story of a life of changing horizons and artistic achievement. Growing up in a large family ("we didn't know we were poor"), he bartered pictures with town kids and carved trinkets to sell to tourists. Encouraged by good high school teachers at Grand Marais, he attended art school in Minneapolis, then moved to New York City. At the Art Students League, George went about becoming an artist in earnest, absorbing the excitement of the new American style, Abstract Expressionism; showing his work in Greenwich Village lofts; and spending summers working and painting in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Marriage and a teaching job at the Rhode Island School of Design seemed to fix his career firmly in the East. But in 1970, his direction turned toward home, and George began to search out his Ojibway heritage. His luminous, small, horizon paintings reflect his return to the "big water." Turning the Feather Around, the title taken from a name given to George in a healing ceremony, is a work of intimate personal disclosure that captures the pulse of the speaking voice and the vision of the artist's eye."--BOOK JACKET.