Morgan Blair

A) My emotional support *NYSNC throw blanket, a live cat, an unimaginably disturbing deck of playing cards made by Alan Resnick.
B) Thirsty, stoned, borderline relaxed-ish for the first time in a week.
C) Pupusas, watermelon, blueberries I picked in Massachusetts, grilled eggplant, water, Super Pollo.

I think it’s funny when people are super serious about their “undergrad work, like I have a really hard time believing you weren’t actually just eighteen years old having recently completed a black and white charcoal portrait of Zack De La Rocha from Rage Against the Machine for your high school art class before eating your first half-eighth of mushrooms and realising the importance of fractals while trying to grow a singular dreadlock.
At RISD I studied Illustration because I liked drawing and painting pictures of stuff, so for all of college and a few years after I was on this default path of becoming an illustrator. I ended up doing some work for The New York Times and other publications, but it always completely stressed me out and it grated at me to be art directed, especially around the legibility of my work in relation to random topics I had no interest in. I wouldn’t say I had any epiphanies during this time, more of a slow realisation that I sort of hated doing illustration.

At some point I stopped taking on the very intermittent editorial jobs I was getting and started assisting other artists instead, and eventually that income was enough to support a studio practice where I could make weirder, more abstract work. I started trying to unlearn some of the principles of illustration I had been shoehorning into my work, and my focus shifted to making paintings that were more open to interpretation, or presented confusing or optical spatial relationships, or used garish, clashing colours that vibrated against each other and were hard to look at. It’s sort of a fun exercise to think, how can I take away what I’ve been taught makes a successful image, and still make a good painting?

Some stuff that helped steer me in that direction over time… discovering Lightning Bolt and Brian Chippendale’s work and then seeing the Fort Thunder show at the RISD museum planted a seed in my mind of chaotic, glitchy patterns and frenetic saturation of detail and colour I hadn’t really seen before.
Once in New York, getting to share a studio and become friends with my pal Maya Hayuk opened up a whole community of brilliant weirdos I still look up to. Watching her work I realised, oh, you can potentially have an expansive, fun career making abstract work and collaborating with musicians and clothing and walls and all kinds of shit, while also showing at galleries and museums, while also being a hilarious nut. She’ll always be a forever hero of mine. Also Magic Eye posters.

My studio used to be a dojo and came with a few accoutrements when I moved in seven years ago, including this giant, heavy-ass trifold mirror that I just never moved. I’ve thought about curbing it at various points because sometimes when people come by I start thinking, wow, I must look like a vapid ding-dong with this thing here. But am I actually more of a vapid ding-dong for worrying about how it looks to have a giant, heavy-ass trifold mirror in my studio? Sometimes I just give myself the creeps! Other times, my mind plays tricks on me. It all keeps adding up; I think I’m cracking up! It’s like… am I just paranoid? Or am I just stoned?
Recently someone described it as “the soul of the studio” and that sounded like something. It can be pretty isolating being in here by myself — ‘here’ meaning in my studio, paintings, head, etc. The mirror is like a proof-of-life that reminds me I’m an alive thing moving around in real space and time. So I guess I would have to say painting isn’t so much an extension of me as it is a backwards, imploded, smoldering k-hole of me where anxiety battles YouTube in a hall of giant, heavy-ass trifold mirrors.

I find I’m mostly drawn to artists whose work is deeply problematic and upsetting, cartoon-based, heavy-handed in its use of metaphor OR physically heavy (over five hundred pounds), highly decorative and ornate, and/or gravely masculine in nature — not both.

I am actually looking to break into several new and exciting girl boss-adjacent social sectors, including the domesticated bald eagle community; Cross-Country Water Skiers of Madison, Wisconsin; the Association of Canceled NFL Referee Wives; Radical Yogurt Truthers Society (YRTS); and Flat Earth Apologists & Enablers Anonymous. If anyone has connections to any of these groups and would be willing to make an introduction, please reach out.
I have an inside scoop on some really unique investment opportunities for people in these worlds who are interested in making millions from the comfort of their homes, simply by empowering women through networking, crypto and single-use plastics-based currencies. Hit me on my line!

Basically I have a lot of the same ideas about pants as I do about paintings. Paintings as pants… pants as paintings. Pantings. I’ve never been the biggest fan of subtlety — I like when it’s too much, all bang bang and not much boop boop, insatiable/relentless to the point of being punishing and then funny. Not that my paintings are soooo kooky, but I think they do a fair amount of edging…. or at least flirting with those boundaries.
So imagine my delight when it turns out punishing density of colour and pattern is also applicable to garments. I like the idea of loud camouflage. Loud on loud. Being loud and making my surroundings loud so I can be loud without being loud, or something like that. Like blasting dancehall next to a freight train for example.

When I famously had my Lamborghini, it always used to give me this alarming orange light that said ABS. I googled it once but got mostly a lot of pictures of abdominal muscles, so I never figured out what the light meant and ultimately I sold the car.

I’ve never laughed.

I’m happy to take this opportunity to announce my newest, very real (!) collaboration with Academi, formerly Ex, formerly Blackwater, entitled Sublimating Subversion, in which we have completely ensconced their Herdon, VA headquarters (13530 Dulles Technology Dr #500, United States) in high-gloss vinyl wrap depicting a playful yet calming motif of rounded abstract shapes in conversation with more angular abstract forms, bringing onlookers together by presenting opportunities to engage in meaningful dialogue around concepts such as nature, unity, and gratitude… all in my signature funky, graphic style :)
I’m equally proud to report that I will be able to redistribute the full payment of $800,000 back to my community in the form of investment in renewable fossil fuels and rare/vintage NFTs.

Hard to say, but opportunities to travel and have cool/weird/scary/fun experiences in new places with new and old friends gotta be right up there. Driving across the country with one of my dearest friends for my first art show, guided by thirty pages of printed-out MapQuest directions to every Salvation Army along the way. Being two hundred feet up in a boom lift with Niko painting a wall in the Netherlands and then getting lost in the woods on rented bikes searching for this one restaurant across from a field of sheep. Buying a grip of bootleg airbrushed Looney Toons shirts from a headshop in Maastricht.
Going ham with patches on a bunch of hats with Joe in downtown LA and giving them to all my friends back at the hotel pool. A haunted, abandoned porn mansion Airbnb in the hills. Getting lost in Miami. Getting lost in Basel. Getting Lost in Brussels. Fish tacos at Pescadito in Mexico City and watching a guy on a moped steal Ray’s phone out of his hand. Nicoise salad and a giant piece of cake at the Madonna Inn with Nick. Mushrooms at the Madonna Inn with [redacted]. A day trip to Ghent with Krysta to learn about stained glass. Painting with Maya in Western Mass. Silent beer pong in East Hampton and accidentally summoning a cop. The same chowder four times with Steve in Montauk and trying to paint in the rain.
A juggalo talent show in Detroit and Sam’s weekend Hellcat. Driving to Bolinas listening to Graceland with Johnny and Bazil, hearing a witch’s singular cackle in a parking lot. Painting Alessandra’s shed in Maine. Painting a sign for the farm where I worked growing up and getting paid in blueberries. Meeting APS and Carolyn and their kids at LAX after they missed our flight, crashing their family vacation and eating Zankou chicken. Painting on a school full of kids who shared their art with me, and accidentally memorising the lyrics of the custodian’s live Kenny Chesney track on repeat. Frozen margs and a terrible cover band in Buffalo. Every accent in Atlanta.
But ultimately, I would say the best part of making largely unintelligible paintings that are sort of hard to look at and have burdensome, garbled clickbait titles is definitely the unprecedented access to fame and material wealth.

Yes!!!!! Badly!!!!! Ideally I would like to be CFO of Nestle Global, Amazon.com, or PepsiCo Inc, I don’t care which. Please stop making me ’create‘ and make paintings, it is cruel and I only want to develop strategies that will grow the business and increase capital while handling negotiations for mergers, acquisitions, and the establishment of new divisions within the company.

I think the car music you’re referencing is music I’m continuously overhearing or shazaming from cars driving past my studio in Queens. Every year I start a new playlist of all these songs and they get to be like 50+ hours long because I’ve become obsessed with collecting as many as I can, and now have a Pavlovian response to the vibrations of any sound system within a two-mile radius.

The playlists cover a wide spectrum of genres including dembow, reggaeton, salsa, cumbia, baile funk, freestyle, dancehall, reggae, Afrobeats, rap, R&B, metal, Mahraganat, and one track called Bagpipe Drone A#/Bb from when I accidentally shazamed the nearby freight train. I get really excited about this kind of shit for some reason, I guess I’m just *cRaZy* like that. To be honest, there are just a ton of absolute bangers.
My own taste in music is a lot like my taste in art and pants… loud, intense, repeating, etc. I’m in love with dancehall. And house music, rap, new wave, kwaito, dembow again, Italo disco. I recently learned how to laptop DJ and it’s fun as hell. Hire me for your house party or block party, I work for tips (cash and unsolicited advice).

I will leave you with a salient quote from one of the great thinkers of our time, Ron Jeremy: “Intellectual property is a key aspect for economic development.”