INTRODUCTION

L. Scooter Morris likens her work to music but she emulates no other composer. The melodies are distinctly hers. In a recent conversation, she expanded on this theme:

I do not try and hit the cool note, she told me. I’m more interested in capturing the lyrical music that I find to be my own.

The musical metaphor is deserved. You can hear it in all her work—especially in her Stacked Landscapes series, where she composes something so

ambitious it becomes truly symphonic.

In paintings like Places I Remember, where three panels relate to more than one landscape simultaneously, the persistence of vision competes with the passage of time. Proustian memories blur the notion of past present and future. And her

painting-within-a painting approach achieves a kind of Bach-like visual counterpoint.

Simply put, Morris’ work acknowledges that we rarely experience anything in laboratorical isolation, that the meaningful incidents in our lives never stand alone, that they are modified and defined by the sum total of our being — with all its inexplicable

coincidences, conflicting emotions and unanswerable questions.

In this monograph you will witness the evolution of Morris’ musicality — a multi- dimensional process that more closely approximates our senses and emotions and how we actually experience things. Whether it sounds like the piercing note of a violin in an empty room or the soothing tones of a lullaby, you will

undoubtedly recognize her songs as your own. Listen.

— Ronn Spencer, Santa Fe