Perfect precision From June Taylor Dancer to
Catskill gallery-owner, |
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| Woodstock Times by Paul Smart July 26, 2007 |
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Lee Anne Morgan has set up a working studio in the rear of her light-filled Main Street gallery where she applies encaustic washes of wax and pigment to photographs of flowers, clouds and close-ups of the Buddha that she later manipulates in Photoshop to create restive, atmospheric abstracts that are as much about process as recognizable objects from the world around us. New Age music plays quietly in the background. A steady stream of the town's new visitors come in and out of the gallery, eyeing her works and the paintings, sculpture, pottery and photographs of the handful of other artists she shows alongside her own work. Morgan is delighted to be devoting her life to visual arts - a track she took up full-time only after having completed careers as a child prodigy with her own teen television show in Cleveland in the early days of television, four years as a June Taylor Dancer on the Jackie Gleason Show, time working the Broadway musical scene, over a decade as a top advertising executive and the formation of a top-shelf consultancy firm with her ex-husband, Olive-based lawyer and art collector Arthur Anderson. "My 'calling' as an artist began with a performing arts career at the age of five, which was thrust on me as a remedy for having polio as a child," Morgan recalls in her professional Biographical Narrative. In person, she described a doctor telling her she should take up swimming, like FDR had done, and herself insisting on taking dance lessons like all her friends at the time - this after having suffered paralysis on her left side as a toddler. While her father worried that his daughter would be humiliated following such a course, Morgan's mother supported her wholeheartedly. "For me, it was all inner drive from there on," she says, describing years of practice and performance. By 10 she had started her own dance school for kids younger than her; by 13 she was hosting a Cleveland television show; and by 16 she had created an opening act for the big nightclub headliners of the day - Tony Bennett and Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis, Jr., Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorm, - who would regularly play her hometown, then a city in its prime. She eventually made it out onto the road and then, at 18, left for New York to study at the Actors' Studio, which was then hosting other up-and-comers such as Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Lee Remick and Barbara Cook. Morgan's mother left her father, a professional fireman who had built his daughter a basement dance studio when she was but a girl, to accompany Lee Anne to Manhattan. After taking her act to the Copacabana and other local venues, she landed one of 16 slots with the dance troupe that would support her for the next four years - out of a field of over 700 fellow candidates. "This is a team. There will be no individuals...When I tell you that your arm and hand should be extended to your shoulder or at your waist, I mean it. One half-inch off and I get angry. You are here to work in perfect precision," Taylor told her chorus, who would perform live before The Honeymooners episodes for three minutes each week. "When you arrive at the theater on videotaping day, I want you dressed as ladies, not looking like tired, over-the-hill and run-of-the-mill chorus dancers. You will do nothing to embarrass Jackie or me...Do not gain weight or you will be fired. Let's get started!" Throughout each week's rehearsals, Gleason would show up with rolling trays of champagne, freshly brewed coffee and pastries. After each performance, he'd have a dozen roses waiting for each dancer at their dressing-room mirrors, to be carried by each as they left the Ed Sullivan Theater and stepped out onto Broadway - then at its prime in an early-1960s heyday where high and low culture seemed to meet among bright lights and skinny ties, witty songs and the rise of a savvy new American character. Morgan, now, says that despite any interaction between the visual and performing arts in her or many of her compatriots' lives, she continued a childhood love for painting and drawing throughout her dancing years - as well as later, when Gleason and Taylor left for Miami and she stayed on to try her hand at Broadway. "I was rigorously trained in all I did," she says of the career in which she gained her first confidence, and which still seems to permeate her work ethic. "There's nothing that involves more practice, more drive than being a professional dancer...that beginning ended up translating itself into everything I was doing, and all I've done since...It seemed a natural part of creating an entire life in the arts, in doing what I wanted to do most."Sure, she adds; she'd eventually tire of the Astaire and Rogers, Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse movies that were her Grail when a girl - but never the professionalism inherent in the best of any art, be it performed or simply created, shown and sold. When Morgan found age creeping up on her in her late 20s and early 30s, as it does for all dancers and similar athletes, she created a new life for herself on Madison Avenue - then another new frontier for American creativity via the early, splashy days of new advertising. She worked at Ogilvy & Mather, Saatchi, J. Walter Thompson and Ketchum, applying her innate sense of drive and deeper sense of aesthetics to an eye for visual acuity that would later allow her to start her own consulting business geared towards helping major advertisers evaluate the creative work that they were commissioning from top agencies. Through her comfortable income, her advertising career afforded the art supplies that she kept buying to keep her private escapes into painting and photography alive. She also picked up lessons from the shifts in graphicality that all our imagery was making during those years when Avedon, Penn, Warhol and others took what was being created to sell product and used it also to advertise the benefits of high culturality, the beauty of modern art. "To this day, there's always a strong graphic quality to my art," she says. "I make things to sell to real people at affordable prices." Eventually, Morgan found herself at a place where she had enough of the comforts of an executive life; she was gaining nothing new from making money, living the entertained life. She wanted more - something more akin to the benefits of the self-taught Buddhism that she had started practicing, as fervently and rigorously as all she did, in her mid-40s. She took to heart the idea, expressed so well in Herman Hesse's famous book Siddhartha, that one needed to find one's own path - and left it all for a country home. First she bought and renovated a farm up in the Delaware County township of Roxbury, where she built a studio to start exploring and perfecting her artwork. She shot rolls and rolls of film - of flowers, the sky, the world she was finally inhabiting fully after years of driving herself in urban settings - and then realized that she wanted to move a step further away, to a dreamland she had been visiting for years: Deer Isle, Maine. There, Morgan eventually opened her first version of the gallery for which she is now known, on the suggestion of artist friends who suggested that she sell her works out of her own studio. When she eventually decided she wanted to move back to New York to be closer to the worlds that she had grown to know over the years, she brought with her a steady clientele - as well as new bodies of work all her own, and that drive. "I guess you could say it's all gone from the ridiculous to the sublime," Morgan says of her life cycle, all of which fuels her art and, in exquisitely controlled fashion, her gallery. She says that she's now selling off earlier bodies of work at cheaper prices to get it out of her life so she has room for new creative endeavors. She's painting more, and wanting to do sculptures mixing clay, wax and precious metals. | ||
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Studio at 54 Fyke Road |
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