Morgan Irons Studio

Happy New Year! I celebrated my birthday on NYE with dear friends in a dear place. 🏔️🌲
I started the year fasting four days and nights under an oak tree, asking for a vision. I came home and with ruthless love - bit the heads off of anything no longer vital and threw them into the river.

What followed was the most expansive year I’ve had. Somehow, the universe and I conspired to build a container sturdy enough to hold this work and this life. It is not lost on me the improbability of getting to live this season of in full sovereignty and creation. As a woman, in the woods, fully in my own energy. It’s likely never happened in my lineage. I watch the yellow female crossbills out my window. They pull seeds out of pinecones with their specialized crooked beaks that evolved just for this task, in this place. In the year ahead I hope to experience more stories that are mine, be surprised and broken and renewed again by love, and make art of it all. I carry immense gratitude for this year and those who walked it with me, trusted me to carry their visions, supported my work and helped. My community is unwavering. The die has been cast, onward we go!

Thank you to everyone who helped make this wondrous thing happen, and to everyone who came out to receive it. What a village it took, what a story, and what a year it was to prepare and develop the work…Deeply moved.

The Widow of Nain, commissioned and revealed by

I’m chipping away on a large scale narrative commission and it has me thinking back to this portrait I made some years ago.  I really love working on heirloom narrative commissions that tell a history.    
    
“𝘗𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘪𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘌𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘯 𝘗𝘧𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳”     
    
I met Ellen in the Fall. I was commissioned to paint a portrait to honor her life and environmental work in the Bull Mountains of Montana. She could no longer stand for long but drove her yellow pickup like a bat out of hell across the rocky grassland prairie, three bouncing dogs in tow. There were hardly roads involved. The Bull Mountains, on the Northern Edge of Yellowstone County, are rugged and storied. But to know Ellen, is to know that she is a force upon the land. She graduated law school in 1966. For context, women made up only 4 percent of the legal profession by 1970. Before she began to practice, her father passed away and she decided to return to the family land as a cattle rancher. She has spent decades working with the Bull Mountain Alliance and the Northern Resource Plains Council to protect this land and its inhabitants from the resident underground coal mine, operated by criminally-convicted Signal Peak Energy. The effects of this mine will reach beyond the conceivable future.     
    
It was an honor to paint this portrait of Ellen, continuing what is at the heart of my work, a deep interest in the labor of women. Big thanks to the commissioner, My Green Earth.   
  

A peak at some works in progress in the cabin studio. It’s closing in on me like the trash compactor scene in Star Wars. May soon panic and forgo my living room for more space. I’ve been thinking lately about some bad advice when I was first starting to show work. I hesitate to even say it aloud out of fear of putting this in any young painter’s head. But I read somewhere that your audience will always judge you based upon your worst painting. I can understand the standards behind that but it was quite paralyzing at a pivotal time. But I can say now many years later, with confidence - that is not true. A lifetime pursuit in a body of work is worth more than any one painting. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Lots of new works to come.