Chasing Matisse is a unique and exciting book project by author James Morgan to be published by Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, in April 2005. James Morgan is a critically-acclaimed author and an aspiring painter, and Chasing Matisse is the kind of once-in-a-lifetime journey that most of us—aspiring painters or not—only dream of. With his wife, Beth, as his muse and model, Morgan followed in the geographic footsteps of his hero Henri Matisse, setting out to see and paint the world Matisse saw and painted.

Morgan recorded his own interpretations in the places where Matisse worked—in the textile marts of his native Picardy; along the boulevards of bustling, romantic Paris; on wild and windswept Belle- Ile, off the Brittany coast ; in sunny Collioure near the Pyrenees, where Matisse first discovered the life-changing light of the South; across the French Riviera to sybaritic Nice and spiritual Vence; and on brief side trips to Morocco and Corsica.

And as Morgan retraced the journey of Henri Matisse’s life, he began a life journey of his own. The author describes it best :

In 1990, after many years away from painting, I signed up for a summer course at the Arkansas Arts Center, my only formal art instruction other than one year in high school. It was good to smell the oils again, but while I could create recognizable shapes I still had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t know if I wanted to be a realist or an impressionist (impressionist looked easier). I didn’t know if I wanted to paint landscapes, still - lifes, or portraits. And even if I’d known my mind, I didn’t know how to control the paints so that they would express what I wanted to say. The three-month course was way too short.

After it was over I didn’t sign up for another. Instead, I plodded on, hit and miss, all by myself. I also began reading about Matisse and studying his work. But the more I painted, and the more I pored over Matisse’s brilliant panels of shape and color, the more importance I attached to one thing the teacher had casually tossed out during one of his art lessons that summer: ‘Most people don’t really see,’ he said. ‘They just look. If you’re going to be an artist, you have to train yourself to see.’

For the first time in my life I understood how Claude Monet could paint the same haystacks over and over— and why Matisse inevitably returned to his pewter pitcher, his wrought iron table, his goldfish bowl, his Rocaille armchair. What I suddenly grasped was a concept as profound as it was simple: It’s not the scene, it’s the seeing.

Matisse himself said something on the subject that I believe is very relevant to our contemporary times: ‘Everything that we see in our daily life is more or less distorted by acquired habits, and this is perhaps more evident in an age like ours when cinema posters and magazines present us every day with a flood of readymade images which are to the eye what prejudices are to the mind. The effort to see things without distortion demands a kind of courage; and this courage is essential to the artist, who has to look at everything as though he were seeing it for the first time….’

My two artistic heroes have been Ernest Hemingway and Henri Matisse. But what I admire about Matisse’s story, compared to that of Hemingway, is that Matisse kept seeing freshly, without distortion—another way of saying that he kept finding the new, the creat ive, the life affirming within him. Hemingway shot himself at age 62. But at age 85, when Matisse could no longer see to paint, he sat in a wheelchair in the sun-drenched south of France struggling to express himself by cutting shapes of brightly-colored paper and pinning them to his studio wall.

And that’s why I’m chasing Matisse—not to try to become the painter he was, but for at least one year in my life to boldly work at absorbing his affirming spirit, at drawing strength from his commitment to a life of creating, at co-opting his fierce courage to see without distortion.

Copyright © 2005 James Morgan & Beth Arnold. All rights reserved