FILTER RESULTS × Close
by Artist (111)
by Country (2)
by Object Type (12)
Skip to Content
NEHMA logo
Showing 40 of 114

Print this page
Image of Deerslayer #2

Aaron Morse

American, b. 1974

Deerslayer #2
2006

Acrylic and oil on canvas
60 x 88 x 1.5 in.
Gift of the Kathryn C. Wanlass Foundation
2010.22

“On the human imagination events produce the effects of time.” This is the first sentence of James Fenimore Cooper’s 1841 historical novel The Deerslayer, which recounts the adventures of a 1740s-era frontiersman in upstate New York (where Cooper grew up in what had once been Mohawk and Oneida territory). The eponymous Deerslayer is a central character in all five of Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, the second and most famous of which, The Last of the Mohicans (1826), has spawned adaptations ever since, including the 1992 blockbuster lm starring Daniel Day-Lewis.

From that modern romantic reimagining of a romanticized historical tale, Los Angeles–based artist Aaron Morse, who grew up in Tucson surrounded by cowboy- and-Indian kitsch, pulled the figures for Deerslayer #2. The painting’s crayon-box palette is sparked, like much of Morse’s work, by illustrations in history textbooks and comic books—especially the Classics Illustrated comics series of radically condensed, splashily illustrated adaptations (including many of Cooper’s novels) produced from the 1940s to 1970s. Within their world of dramatized fiction and manipulated truth, the eyes of Morse’s figures are silvery blanks, their bodies freeze-framed and stretched as if by memory or projection.

The continual processing of events into history, into an overarching but always plastic and debatable human narrative—or, as Cooper puts it in his Deerslayer opening, the process by which events produce the effects of time on the human imagination—is among Morse’s ongoing interests. A sprawling temporary mural for the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, completed two years after Deerslayer #2, was a vividly colored time line shooting through the history of the entire planet. More recent paintings capture surreal, majestic clouds and ocean waves. Sublime landscapes, at the heart of a Romantic tradition that also includes idealized history, are for him a set of forms to be filled out
in endless variation

Katherine Satorius

Keywords
Click a term to view the records with the same keyword
This object has the following keywords:
acrylic paint, blue, deer, distorted, knives, Last of the Mohicans, mountain, movies, Native American, oil paint, orange, people, pink, silhouette

Exhibition List
This object was included in the following exhibitions:

Also found in
Click a portfolio name to view all the objects in that portfolio
This object is a member of the following portfolios:
Thumbnail image of Collecting on the Edge
Collecting on the Edge
Thumbnail image of Paintings
Paintings
Thumbnail image of Utah Habitats, Animals & Art
Utah Habitats, Animals & Art

Your current search criteria is: Portfolio is "Collecting on the Edge" and [Objects]Century is ".





This site facilitates access to the art and artifact collections by providing digitally searchable records for thousands objects. The information on these pages is not definitive or comprehensive. We are regularly adding artworks and updating research online. We welcome your comments.