Morgan Mercer is a Twin Cities-based oil painter and collage artist who creates lush scenes in paper and paint of women finding their way back to themselves through imaginative landscapes. Her work begins by creating a collage of hand-cut black and white images. When a collage is finished, it becomes the compositional framework for a larger abstract oil painting based on that scene. To create a painting, Mercer prints a copy of the collage on transparency paper and projects it onto a canvas where she draws it with an oil stick. In each subsequent layer of paint, she abstracts the imagery from the collage onto the canvas by focusing on different shapes, lines, feelings or areas of negative space until the painting explodes in a mass of color, overlapping brushstrokes and energetic marks. Both her collages and paintings depict stories of powerful female characters who revel in adventure and discovery, and make space to reclaim their own feelings of wonder, joy, curiosity and peace. Her work is a reminder, both to herself and others, to lean into a version of life that feels wildly alive and their own.
Open for Art-A-Whirl®, Art Attack, and many other NKB events such as Summer Sizzle, Small Business Saturday, Holiday Lane, Northrup King Nights and occasional Open Studio Saturdays. Send me an email or check Instagram to find open studio times or to set up an appointment.
