The first images in the HBO documentary Master of Light show George Anthony Morton chopping up white powder. That crafty opening knowingly plays on our assumptions that Morton is cooking dope. A few beats later and it’s revealed that he’s actually just making paint.
Morton acknowledges the fake-out on a Zoom call. “I was preparing drugs in a similar fashion,” the ex-convict turned celebrated painter says with an ear-to-ear grin. He also praises the way the Dutch film-maker Rosa Ruth Boesten encapsulates the Kansas City native’s harrowing and inspiring journey with a few suggestive strokes.
Morton spent his entire 20s in federal penitentiaries, serving an 11-year sentence for drug charges. While locked up, he found comfort and therapy in art, honing his craft and painting striking portraits that are regularly compared to those by Rembrandt. The Dutch painter’s chiaroscuro style, playing with light and shade, becomes a visual motif in both Morton’s life and work.
In Master of Light, Morton walks through the European art space like a disruptive presence, a Black man in his camo jacket gliding through museums where no one like him adorns the walls. These are moments that pair nicely with Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s Apeshit video, in which they make the Louvre a space to celebrate their Black art.
Taking a break from those spaces, Morton brings us into intimate moments at home in Atlanta and Kansas City, as he reconnects with his family members, his five-year-old daughter in tow, painting their portraits as a way to bond while trying to heal from his hostile upbringing.
Morton, 39, is the oldest of 11 siblings, born to a mother who had him at 15. He learned the drug game from his mother and grandmother, who sold out of the home he was raised in. It was that house on the street, he says at one point in the film, where everyone went to score. He also suspects that his mother is directly responsible for his arrest when he was 19, offering him up to detectives as part of a deal to get out of her own charges.
His feelings around that betrayal are conflicted. Nevertheless, we find him early in the doc calmly trying to post bond for his mother’s most recent arrest. Throughout the documentary, Morton speaks with empathy for the people who – under trying circumstances – hurt him. He’s lucid about the systemic cycle of poverty and trauma that led him and so many other Black men into the justice system. He also makes an effort to bring light into a very dark situation.
There’s that motif, which Morton regularly brings up during our conversation. He’s slouched in a seat sitting next to Master of Light’s producer, Roger Ross Williams. Both of them are speaking from Williams’s Brooklyn office. An Emmy award and poster for Williams’s Oscar-nominated doc Life Animated decorate the background.
Morton, wearing a hoodie with multiple flannel patterns and sporting box braids, speaks with a certain mysticism about how his journey ended up on screen, as though it was all preordained. “This documentary started honestly with being born on the autumn equinox,” he says, ascribing meaning to the date when the length of day and night are exactly equal. “My birthday is equal dark and light personified.”
He continues this line of reasoning by remembering seeing a Rembrandt in a museum as a child and being inspired. After he got out of prison and began making a name for himself as an artist, an article in the Sag Harbor Express dubbed Morton “a Rembrandt from the streets”. Around the same time, he visited a psychic in New York City. He says she told him that the name Rembrandt keeps coming up among the “voices” she hears, as though he could have been the Dutch painter in a past life.
This all happened before Morton became the first Black graduate at the Florence Academy of Art, attending the school’s New Jersey campus, and went on a European tour, where he studied a few Rembrandts. During that tour, he connected with Boesten, a film-maker based out of Amsterdam who was captivated by Morton’s story and eager to make it her feature debut. She also happened to live within walking distance of Rembrandt’s house. (That psychic was working out of something Morton calls “the Namaste house” in New York, in case anyone’s wondering.)
In her own director’s notes offered to the press, Boesten acknowledges her whiteness and the privileged lens she brings to the story. That of course didn’t faze her collaborators. “She had a particularly sensitive approach,” says Williams, who jumped in to produce after seeing Boesten’s footage. He sets Boesten apart from extractive film-makers, the kind who seek out sensational stories about poverty and hardship before moving on to their next story. “She was committed,” Williams says.
At a time in the culture when there’s a push for more Black film-makers telling Black stories, Morton has a more generous but not necessarily laissez-faire attitude about it. He doesn’t believe artists should be boxed in or restricted from telling stories from other people’s backgrounds, so long as they come with the right purview.
“[Boesten] approached this with the utmost integrity,” Morton says. He adds that the film-maker and subject were joined at the hip during a long collaboration that benefited from the synchronicities between them: “Her being Dutch and me studying the Dutch masters. Her being fresh out of film school, meeting me as I was graduating art school and being able to see that magic where our artistry meet. It was very much collaborative and an apprenticeship for both of us. She would help me with my paintings, and I would help her in turn. We learned that way.”
The opening credits describe Master of Light as “a film by Rosa Ruth Boesten and George Anthony Morton”, an acknowledgment that is relatively unseen in a documentary. That gives Morton, as a subject, some ownership over the film, as though it too were a self-portrait, like the one he’s painting during the credits. Boesten makes the film an extension of Morton’s art, relying on natural light, searching for deep contrasts, framing subjects according to his portraiture and becoming part of his path to healing.
That marriage between Boesten and Morton’s art comes together powerfully in two moments. The first is when Morton is tending to his younger brother’s wounds after a knife attack. A soft healing light comes in from the window into the tiny apartment as Morton attentively and tenderly applies ointment to the scars across his brother’s body, which are held closed by staples. And then the brother sits for the camera to just take him in.
The second moment is when Morton finally gets his mother to sit for a portrait. Theirs has been an especially difficult relationship. Morton describes the impact she has had on him from an early age: the harsh and damaging first sights, sounds and sensations in a hostile environment that left him unable to trust most anyone. He says he now projects that mistrust on to others. That’s something he still hasn’t fully recovered from. “She still doesn’t know where I live. I have this web of protection around me,” he says.
Nevertheless, she sits reservedly for him and Morton paints a beautiful, dignified and heartfelt portrait of his mother, one that bears witness to her pain but also echoes back to something she said earlier in the film. She talks about being 15, and having Morton, her first child, because she wanted someone to love her. It’s devastating.
“All I wanted was love,” says Morton, when I bring up that moment, appearing somewhat guarded about how much he wants to say or feel regarding his mother’s words.
“The more I can work on healing that relationship and finding reconciliation with her, it impacts my relationship with others and my relationship with myself and my own internal world,” he continues. “The more we can heal that place, it makes me better when I go out in the world.”
Master of Light airs on HBO on 16 November with a UK date to be announced
