THE DAILY PIC (#1698): I don’t know anything more thrilling, culture-wise, than heading to a museum you don’t know and discovering artists you’ve never heard of before. That happened to me a little while ago at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon, where I encountered the wonderful and wild paintings of Morris Graves, a Northwesterner who was famous for a while to either side of World War II. Having myself been trained in the Northeast and Europe, Graves was never on my radar, but he clearly should have been. Today’s Pic are (left) Memorial Day Wildflower Bouquet in the Cemetery of an Abandoned Western Mining Town, from 1936, and a portrait of Bill Cumming from 1938.

I’ll admit that I’m not quite sure what to say about them. That speechlessness is the highest compliment I can pay.

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