Most artists need galleries to get their work before the public eye. They depend upon a venue not only to show their work but also to do what it takes to make it sell. Regardless of this necessary symbiosis, some artists grumble about the 50 percent commission galleries generally take on sales. Painter Heather Neill, a Pennsylvania artist whose work is represented by the Granary Gallery in West Tisbury, isn’t grumbling.      
     
“With some galleries,” she says, “you just drop your paintings off, and that’s it. There’s very little encouragement or support.” Not so, it seems, at the Granary (or its sister galleries – the Field in West Tisbury and the Gardner Colby in Edgartown). What the staff members of these galleries offer their artists goes way beyond sales.

“We feed each other,” Heather says. “I show them other artists and say, ‘This is where I’m headed, so you need to see this work.’”

Gallery owner Chris Morse sometimes gives her ideas for paintings – as when he referred her to a wall clock hanging over a big, old dictionary in the offices of the Vineyard Gazette. Sometimes, he sends her objects he thinks she might like to put into one of her still lifes, like an old teapot she received in the mail from him not long ago.

“Recently, when I needed a beer bottle,” Heather says, “Chris went to Offshore Ale after work, had a couple of beers, and sent me the bottles – they’re perfect. He doesn’t have to do these kinds of things, but it’s in everyone’s best interest for us to be successful. You get out of the relationship what you put into it.”

Conceptual artist Diana Van Nes, who lives in Chappaqua, New York, is another who’s received physical contributions to her pieces in the mail from Chris. “Currently,” she says, “I’m working on a piece using logos from baseball caps. I keep receiving packages from Chris full of wonderful caps he’s found all over the Island.”

As with Heather Neill, Chris occasionally gives Diana ideas for pieces. Not long ago, Diana says, “He told me that he had a huge collection of matchboxes, and that he thought I might like to do something with them. I said, ‘Ooh! Send them down!’”

Chris, Diana says, “seems to intuitively understand his artists, and he knows how to help them bring particular pieces to full fruition.” As an example, she tells of how, in 2001, she found a tattered American flag and simply framed it, leaving it unsigned. Chris, she says, sensed that there was an important idea behind the piece, but said it needed something more. “He asked me to go off and write a few sentences about why I had done it,” she says. “In doing so, I realized that with this work, I wanted the viewer to be the author of its meaning. I put my explanation on a slip of paper on the wall next to the piece, and it sold that afternoon.”

Diana values Chris’s easygoing manner. One year, she made a flag out of moss. “Chris said, ‘I love it, but I can’t believe I have to keep it alive all summer.’” He had a similar response to a piece that incorporated live goldfish, but again, he went with the flow.

A couple of years ago, when Diana learned that she had Parkinson’s disease, she found herself unable to make art. Chris called regularly to see how she was doing and, through gentle encouragement, helped her to start working again. “He exudes happiness,” says Diana, “and it rubs off on you.”

Kenneth Vincent is a painter whose work has been highly influenced by input from the Granary’s staff. A year-round West Tisbury resident whose ancestors were among the first European families to settle on Martha’s Vineyard in the late 1600s, Ken was twenty-six when he first approached Chris in the summer of 2001.

Chris recalls, “The first painting he showed me was a dead sunflower in a brown vase. He was making still lifes perhaps a little more contemporary than they needed to be.” Ken concurs: “In retrospect, doing still lifes was not a good idea for me; they weren’t really where my talents lay.” Chris hung a few in the Field Gallery anyway, but none sold that first summer.

The next year, Ken sat down with Chris’s associate David Wallis (whose paintings are also represented at the Granary), who offered him feedback on his work. “He suggested that I try painting landscapes,” Ken says. “He said that when people come to the Vineyard and buy paintings by a local Island artist, they’re not looking for still lifes.” So he painted two landscapes and brought them into the gallery. The staff responded well to the one painted in the somewhat abstract style that Ken continues to use.

“They thought it was a lot fresher,” he says. “They challenged me to bring in five new pieces, and Chris gave me $500 for supplies. I brought in five pieces a week later. Three of them sold in the first week, and I sold fifteen paintings that summer. I was like a short-order cook, making new work to replace the pieces that sold.”

At the end of the season, Ken asked for a show, and he had his first one – at the Granary – the following year, in 2003. Now he has a show every year and is one of the gallery’s most successful artists, but he continues to value the ongoing feedback he gets from the gallery personnel.

“It’s really helped me to grow as an artist,” Ken says. “I can bounce things off them, and we have a close enough relationship that Chris can say, ‘I like this and this, but overall, it’s not working.’ I like the frankness; I don’t take it personally, I just apply it to the next painting.”

Chris says, “We liked Ken from the beginning. We wanted to see him succeed. Now we have a sense of pride in his work, because of the work we’ve done with him.”

This may be the key to why Chris Morse works as closely with his artists as he does: Through them, he finds an outlet for his own creativity, and through their success, realizes a certain artistic achievement of his own. Of course, there’s creativity involved in making a business run successfully, and Chris has come a long way since he took his first job at the Granary in 1987, as a bartender at its special events. At the time, he was still in college, and the gallery’s full name was the Granary Gallery in the Red Barn Emporium. Something in the way he handled a cocktail shaker must have impressed owners Brandon White and Bruce Blackwell, because after only two evenings with Chris behind the white tablecloth, they offered him a position in sales. Nine years later, in 1996, he bought the gallery and shortened the name to the Granary Gallery. His success as its owner shows not only in his acquisitions of the Field and the Gardner Colby, but also in his intention to keep both the Granary and the Gardner Colby open year-round beginning next year.

But business success is only part of what motivates him.

“In college,” says Chris, who majored in business administration, “I took every art course offered – color theory, art appreciation, drawing, et cetera. I’m not an artist, though. I’ve tried, but I can’t do it. My first winter on Martha’s Vineyard, I bought some oils and canvas, and for three weekends, I toiled away in frustration. I had expectations that my ability was not able to match. I’d like to be able to paint in a crisp, Hopperish style, but I know better.”

Instead, he funnels this creative side of himself into his collaborative work with artists. “I think it’s fun to talk to artists about the process,” he says, “and to have a hand in the path that their art takes.”

Photorealist painter Steve Mills says that his wife has remarked that he is Chris’s artistic outlet. On occasion, Chris collaborates with Steve in creating a composition that Steve later paints. While they’re setting up a still life, Chris might offer an object to add to the piece, suggest moving elements around, or recommend a different angle or lighting.

“David Wallis once said, ‘He’s painting through you,’” says Steve. “Chris comes up with great ideas, and then through me, we complete those ideas.” Steve spends a lot of time on the Island, but as he lives in Florida, he finds other ways to get input from Chris. “I’ll take a bunch of photos of my work and JPEG them to Chris through the Internet,” he says. “I don’t have many artist friends here, so this is the only way I get feedback.”

Steve has been at the Granary for twenty-six years – his entire career as a professional artist. His work also shows at galleries in New York and London, but the Granary is home – so much so that he proposed to his wife, Leigh, at the opening of his show five summers ago.

“My mom and dad and grandparents all came up,” he recounts. “Halfway through the opening, I corralled people out to the courtyard. I was holding a wrapped painting, and I said, ‘I’ve been at the gallery for twenty-one years, and now, with this painting, it’s time for me to go in a new direction.’ Leigh was panicking, because we’d just bought a house. But then I unveiled the painting – a trompe l’oeil of a bulletin board with a note tacked to it reading ‘Leigh, will you marry me?’ People were crying, and the opening turned into an engagement party. I sold eight canvasses that night.”

Later that evening, he and Leigh went to L’Étoile for a celebratory dinner. At the end of the meal, the waiter brought them an envelope containing a note: Chris had taken care of the tab.

A cynic might say that this gesture was just good business – keep your artists happy. While this would certainly be true, it’s clear that the artists who work with Chris Morse and his associates are happy about more than just the business end of things.

“I was just some kid who showed up with my paintings,” says Ken Vincent. “Chris took a risk with me.

If you put in the effort, he puts in double the effort for you.”

“My heart is there,” agrees Heather Neill. “I want to grow old with that gallery.”