Carl and Hilda Morris

Carl and Hilda Morris were Portland, Oregon based artists who had a profound impact on my childhood — through the osmosis of spending a lot of time there. Our family life was rich in its own way, but very different from the Morris home.

My family was politically and public service oriented. My father was a lawyer/arbitrator/politician who got up and went to work early, while my Mom stayed home with us five kids. Dad was very active in the Oregon State Legislature, ran the Ways and Means committee for many years and later was in the State Senate, and my mother was active on the World Affairs Council.

Everything was different at the Morris household: the food, the smells, and the artist-built home with few right angles and every bedroom on posts overlooking Carl and Hilda’s studio.

This beat-generation couple would paint and sculpt until 3 in the morning, then one of them would, with friendly groans, get up briefly to get me and their son David off to school, then go back to bed until lunchtime. David and I watched his parents work at night or we’d spy on the bohemians in live drawing classes below by cracking open David’s window over his parents’ studio. David had his own studio space within his parents’ studio, and I was given a small space within his. None of these things happened at my house.

In the early 1950s, my parents helped sponsor a fellowship that helped support the Morris’s art and we became family friends. My father helped salvage wood left over from the 1948 Vanport Flood, and was one of many volunteers who assisted Carl and Hilda in constructing their unique home and work space.

When I was 7 or 8, my mom almost died of hepatitis and I was farmed out to the Morris household for most of one summer. At the time, Hilda had a ceramic kiln and did a fair amount of work in clay. I first put my hands in clay at the Morris home.

For the remainder of my childhood, I was welcomed for days or weeks at a time in their house, and allowed to make things there. When things got tense at my house, I could call up Hilda and say, “Don’t you think I need to be invited over for a few days?” This was code for Hilda calling my mother and inviting me over. Then, if I needed more time, she would call my mother and explain I needed to stay longer because of some project I had going with her son David, or on my own. Sometimes she just knew I revelled in the emotional and creative space away from our busy and larger family.

Both Carl and Hilda always made me feel respected and important, and gave me the sense that ‘making things’ was very special.