Jason Taylor Morgan

Abstract Artist

Painting came to me late in life—the early days of Covid, in my late sixties, when my mind refused to breathe life into the stalled labyrinth of my sixth novel. Aside from two art prizes in grammar school—for “crayon masterpieces” I was sure were awarded by mistake—I had never tried to paint. My visual sense had always been the backbone of my fiction (and poetry), even from a young age. Using something other than a keyboard to express myself creatively never occurred to me until I was approaching seventy—emotionally fragile … from lockdown and from life, with writer’s emptiness rather than writer’s block, and bored out of my mind.

On one of those deep inner instincts that have punctuated my life at key moments, I ordered acrylic paints, canvas boards, and an easel from Amazon. With little or no drawing skills, I decided I could either spend years learning to paint figuratively—or give myself over to abstraction and explore inner expression rather than outer observation. So I toned down my writer’s syntactical mind and began a passionate journey—with acrylic paint—into the subconscious, the ethereal world, magical thinking, visual emotion, and fleeting glimpses of the natural world’s secret thoughts and rhythms—those blink-and-you-miss-it abstracted moments not meant for everyone to see.

Self-taught, I developed my own methods and techniques as I went along: a style where I rarely use brushes and paint entirely in the moment, allowing spontaneity and hazy visual ideas to converge. My paintings come from a deep inner place that is emotional, intuitive, vaguely intellectual, and full of longings, visions, feelings, and dreams.

“I don’t paint for fun, or to find peace, or even for casual enjoyment. I paint with passion to give birth to something that’s already part of me—viscerally—mentally—emotionally—subconsciously—or present in the ethereal world—or waiting for interpretation in the physical world—but didn’t exist in form an hour before. Something now visual, alive, with its own story, its own meaning, its own colors and breath—like a poet delivering, again and again, their truest possible metaphorical expression. Sometimes I feel that if I were to line all of my hundreds of paintings edge to edge, they would form a full, ever-evolving representation of me.”

Selling my first paintings, original art cards titled and signed, six months after I began, and everything happening surprisingly quickly, I’ve now been a Resident Artist at the Cloverdale Arts Alliance Gallery for three years—heading into a fourth: 2026—and a former Gallery Director, now CAA Gallery Director Emeritus. I’ve shown in eighteen exhibits and continue to push myself in every painting: exploring new ideas, new methods, new ways to bring the fleeting forms that exist inside—out.

My early works, 5 × 7-inch, I called visual poetry—brief glimpses of captured ethereal beauty.