Jason Taylor Morgan

Abstract Artist

Jason Taylor Morgan is a self-taught abstract artist based in Cloverdale, in northern Sonoma County, California. He began painting in his late sixties, during early Covid, after a lifetime spent expressing himself through writing. With little interest in learning to paint figuratively, he turned instinctively to abstraction—and discovered an entirely new creative language.

He paints spontaneously, without preliminary drawings or a predetermined destination. A painting may begin with a color, a movement, a fragment of form, or simply a sense of where the first marks belong. From there he lets the work develop through color, texture, chance, and a deliberate finish. He is interested less in depicting what the eye sees than in discovering what exists just beyond it.

His inspiration comes from memory, music, dreams, and the constantly changing forms and rhythms of the visual imagination. Some paintings emerge quietly; others arrive through vigorous movement and dense accumulations of color. Across both, he is drawn to the tension between chaos and stillness.

Morgan began with small 5 × 7-inch paintings he called visual poetry—brief, concentrated expressions of color and feeling. As the work grew larger, so did its range. He continues to experiment with scale, and with ways of letting a painting stay spontaneous while growing more complex.

He began exhibiting and selling within his first year of painting and has since shown in twenty-two exhibitions. In 2026 he enters his fifth year as a painter  and his fourth as a Resident Artist at the Cloverdale Arts Alliance Gallery, where he previously served as Gallery Director and is now Gallery Director Emeritus.

Morgan is also the author of seven novels, and the visual imagination that has always shaped his fiction inevitably guides his artwork. But painting gives him something writing cannot: immediacy. A novel will take years to reveal itself; a painting can appear in moments.‍ ‍