L. Scooter Morris’s paintings don’t just hang—they press forward. They reach into your space, ask things of you. Built with rough textures, shifting surfaces, and sculpted layers, her works are less about visuals and more about experience. Morris calls herself a sensory illusionist, and it’s easy to see why. Her pieces invite movement, contemplation, and touch. They’re not passive objects; they’re invitations.
What motivates her isn’t polish or perfection. It’s the need to tell the truth—especially the hard, uncomfortable kind. Morris’s work opens space to sit with contradiction, with what we’ve buried, ignored, or rewritten. Her goal isn’t to simplify. It’s to reflect. Her “Sculpted Paintings” aren’t meant to soothe. They’re meant to hold space for doubt, history, and what comes next.
We Are The People (2025)
Acrylic and Mixed Media, 60” x 48”
This painting lays it out plainly. Using pieces of the U.S. founding documents as actual material, Morris layers them into the surface. The result isn’t clean or reverent. It’s frayed, painted over, weathered. The Constitution and the Declaration don’t sit untouched—they’re part of the work’s structure, tangled into the medium like a memory that won’t sit still.
She doesn’t treat the documents as relics. Instead, they’re treated like working material—ideas meant to be tested, revisited, and re-examined. Some of the words remain visible, others are partially lost under thick strokes. That unevenness feels deliberate. Morris seems to be asking: What are we really holding onto?
There’s no nostalgia here. The phrase “We the People” becomes a question more than a declaration. Who counts? Who’s been left out? Who’s still waiting to be heard? The painting doesn’t answer. It holds the discomfort of not knowing.
Felon (2025)
Acrylic and Mixed Media, 30” x 48”
Felon is more intimate but no less weighty. It touches on the stories history likes to skip over—the ones with missing pages and blurred faces. Morris treats the painting like a kind of excavation, scraping through layers of paint and meaning to expose what often stays hidden.
Hints of identity drift through the surface—faint outlines, facial gestures, shadows of people half-remembered or deliberately erased. These aren’t portraits in the traditional sense. They’re impressions, like ghosts caught in the paint.
Rather than cast judgment, Morris lets contradiction remain. The people hinted at here are complex: some may have risen to greatness, others failed, others rewritten into someone else’s version of history. The beauty of the piece lies in its refusal to clean any of it up. It acknowledges the murk and holds it.
Time and Again (2025)
Acrylic and Mixed Media Triptych, 30” x 90”
This three-panel work stretches wide like a historical horizon. At first glance, it seems abstract—muted colors, layered textures, faded text. But the founding documents are in there again, not centered, but sewn into the surface like fossils. They don’t command the composition; they haunt it.
This piece isn’t about a single moment. It’s about recurrence. About how nations repeat themselves, how people carry the same questions forward across generations. There’s no resolution here, no final note. The work feels suspended in time—unfinished by design.
Up close, the surface is full of tension. Scratch marks, peeling layers, suggestions of movement underneath. Morris is saying: this isn’t the first time we’ve asked who we are. And it won’t be the last.
Scooter Morris doesn’t make art for easy answers. Her work turns the wall into a place of reckoning. She invites viewers to stand still, take it in, and maybe leave with more questions than they arrived with. She’s not after clarity. She’s after truth, in all its flawed, tangled layers.
What she gives isn’t a clean narrative—it’s a reflection of what’s real, right now. And sometimes, that’s exactly what’s needed.
