The color of his passion

San Diego — It’s not far from Richard Allen Morris’ basement studio to the Museum of Contemporary Art downtown. But the short walk past San Diego City College and through Old Town spans two worlds.

One is packed to the ceiling with boxes and crates -- a labyrinth stacked with a lifetime of books, LPs, paintings, sculptures and notebooks. Dozens of watercolors are laid out to dry around a worn armchair in front of a TV, its rabbit-ear antenna wrapped with foil.

The other is spacious and airy, stripped of clutter, personal and otherwise.

That’s one reason it took so long -- and a side trip to Europe -- for Morris to get nearly 200 paintings and sculptures from his windowless studio into the museum’s pristine galleries, where “Richard Allen Morris: Retrospective 1958-2005” runs through Aug. 28.

Another is the propensity of California museums to acknowledge homegrown talents only after their works have been shown in New York or Europe. Morris’ survey comes to San Diego by way of the Krefelder Kunstmuseen, in Krefeld, Germany, accompanied by a catalog, acquisitions by the Museum fur Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt and a cascade of critical praise.

The unflappably polite artist says his hometown show is the result of “a kind of a backdoor policy,” taking a mild jab at the local museum but also suggesting a humble fatalism, his sense of being out of place in a celebrity-driven culture. It is as if the 71-year-old Long Beach native prefers sneaking in the backdoor to having the red carpet rolled out in front. His predisposition for going it alone, minus careerist hustling, has kept his profile low.

“It would have been splendid if the show had originated here,” Morris says. “I wish it could have been earlier, when I could have used it. Now it’s a tax write-off. It’s nice, of course. But in terms of what I do in the studio, it doesn’t really matter.”

What Morris has been doing in and out of the studio has mattered to an impressive group of artists. John Baldessari, David Reed and James Hayward met Morris in their formative years. They were inspired by his intelligence and focus, and they were awed by the volume and quality of his art. Unlike many gestural painters, Morris does not make works that express inner torment or angst. His paintings are all about joy. There is tumult but no torture, verve but no suffering.

Baldessari, an internationally renowned artist born in 1931 in National City, just south of San Diego, looks back on the 1960s and writes in the catalog: “I learned what it takes to be an artist from Richard. He changed my life.” Over the phone, he adds: “He was so obsessed with doing art. He has always been a role model for me. I realized how important dedication is.”

Reed, 59, an innovative painter and San Diego native who lives in New York, met Morris in 1964, the summer before his freshman year in college. It was in a drawing class Morris was teaching at the now-defunct La Jolla Museum School. “My drawings were crude and not at all related to Richard’s work,” Reed says. “All I can remember is him encouraging me. That meant a lot. I never forgot it.” The two became friends. “Every time I visited his studio,” Reed says, “I’d see amazing work.”

Hayward, 61, an abstract painter, recalls: “Richard came to San Diego State College one day when I was an 18- or 19-year-old undergrad. He spoke about painting so brilliantly that I actually started to believe I might be a painter. I loved painting, but it seemed complicated beyond my abilities. Richard made it simple. Direct. I understood it immediately. He’s the first real artist I met. I was knocked out.”

Morris started painting seriously in San Diego after he was discharged from the Navy in 1956. During the Korean War, he had been stationed on an aircraft carrier and had painted over the paint-by-number kits other sailors discarded after filling in only a few colors. He stored his recycled works in flight-mission files, which he was in charge of.

But he traces his interest in painting all the way back to kindergarten. When he was handed his first jar of poster paint, he says, “I loaded the brush and hit the paper and that was it. I didn’t stop. I’m still doing it.”

In San Diego, he rented a dollar-a-night room on the fourth floor of a hotel downtown. “I had a little chinkle from the service, not much, but God that was great. Besides me and an old sailor from the whaling days, everyone on the floor was on parole. I kept to myself, dried my paintings on the windowsills, painted on cardboard and drew a lot.”

Morris planned to use the GI Bill to go to San Diego City College but lasted only four days. “The art textbook was ancient and corny,” he recalls, “and I couldn’t even get into the class. So I dropped. I didn’t even get the first check. I probably should have tried to fight it out, but I remember I got stuck in a class on parliamentary procedure. What the hell does that mean to me?”

Instead, he read voraciously, poring over books at the library, reading art magazines at newsstands and buying outdated issues from secondhand bookstores. Along with Baldessari, Morris joined the local artists’ guild and watercolor societies in San Diego and Los Angeles. He befriended other artists, including Guy Williams, Mac McClain, Sheldon Kirby, Sarah Roberts, Helen Stockes and Fred Holle, some of whom showed their works in Balboa Park, setting up easels or leaning canvases against trees.

Baldessari recalls, “Richard had a studio in the Spanish Village in Balboa Park. It was set up for craftspeople and tourists. Richard was the one anomaly, the one serious artist. His place was jampacked with books, boxes, all kinds of odds and ends. He lived on nothing, $25 a month. Friends gave him clothing. Women cooked for him. It became a hangout.”

There were no galleries to speak of. Morris’ first exhibition was at a downtown frame shop. His next show was at Geraldine and Laurence McGilvery’s Nexus Bookstore, next to the La Jolla Museum, now the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

The early decades

Most of his paintings from the ‘50s and ‘60s were representational and in tune with their times. Like Claes Oldenburg, Philip Guston, Claes Oldenburg and Ed Ruscha, Morris made works that brought the spontaneity of Abstract Expressionism into an accessible Pop format.

In “Art International (Pages I-59, Sept. 20/1961)” (1961), he copied, in black-and-white paint, the images in an art magazine. “Zen, Sex and Silver Paint” (1961) is a dark, dense little picture of a rabbit-eared TV. On the screen is what appears to be a close-up of a painting by Morris. Other works, such as “It” (1961), “Wet Paint” (1962) and “Snow Job” (1977), include humorously loaded words. Still others are heads, some rendered with the clarity of cartoons and others realized in juicy brushstrokes. Morris also experimented with Day-Glo spray-paint and stencils, sometimes making abstractions by applying strips of color tape to bare wood panels.

He painted an arsenal of comic-strip pistols: “Gun for Sale,” “Gun for Tess” and “For Boston Blacky,” all from 1965. These grew into a series of lumpy 3-D guns, sculptures Morris still occasionally cobbles together from studio scraps and paints with the same abandon as his canvases. Some viewers interpret them in terms of violence and warfare; others see Morris’ homemade toys as metaphors for art’s power, an interpretation more in line with his intentions.

While he worked in the studio, Morris also wrote poetry, played baritone saxophone, listened to jazz, watched foreign films and Padres games and made monthly trips to L.A. galleries. He took occasional teaching stints and lecture gigs.

Hayward, who now lives on a corner of a Moorpark horse ranch, vividly remembers a field trip: “Richard invited our class to visit the museum in La Jolla with him one Saturday. I was the only student to show up.

“I was so lucky. He showed me the cheeks and noses in the Rembrandts and talked about painting’s heart and soul. I was so captivated I rented a little studio near his in the Spanish Village.... Who I am today is an emulation of the man I met in that studio. When you love painting and you meet someone who’s into it even more deeply, he becomes a hero.”

Morris loved teaching and got a lot out of it: “I had David [Reed] when he was a teenager. He was wonderful. You spied him right away, a serious guy right from the get-go. At the time, I didn’t know him, he didn’t know me. But later on I was very influenced by his paintings. Brilliant stuff. I just love them. They hit the bar and put the juke to it. Oh yeah.”

The years went by. Morris settled into a routine, never traveling, keeping to himself and working. He moved out of the Spanish Village and into a succession of studios, his current one for the last 10 years. All have been on bus routes, because he does not drive. He has exhibited sporadically, three or four times a decade at somewhat off-the-beaten-path venues, and never more than twice at any one until this year. Concurrent with the museum retrospective, he’s having a third exhibition at R.B. Stevenson Gallery in La Jolla, where he’s part of a group show with Ed Moses and Hayward.

For more than a decade, Morris’ regular job was clerking at a place called the Bargain Bookstore, owned by Lafayette Young. He still works two days a week, now at Wahrenbrock’s Book House, and walks there from his studio.

Around 1974, his paintings became increasingly abstract. He works in series, almost always on small canvases, panels and odds and ends. He lays out six to eight on a long table and works on them simultaneously. Speed is essential.

“In the Pink” (1974), “Little Love Wall” (1984), “Green Heaven” (1984) and “Loco Logic” (1986) each consist of two colors vigorously blended with a spatula, brush or sponge, the energy held in check by the limited palettes.

In “Sunday in Paint” (1991), “Fearless Chemist” (1999) and “Make-up” (2000), he has slathered on thick rainbows of color, stirring them with a palette knife to create dense whorls and serendipitous accidents. “Hop, Skip and Jump” (2003) and “Tavern Road” (2004) are nothing but a flat field of color and three or four fat worms of paint Morris has squeezed out like toothpaste, straight from the tube.

A few years ago, Baldessari saw three of the works in gallery owner Eugenio Lopez’s L.A. apartment. “I gotta say, Richard looked so good right next to Barnett Newman, Brice Marden and Donald Judd,” Baldessari says. “Today, when money and art seem inseparable, it’s wonderful to see Richard’s pureness. I mean, we got into art when there was no money in it, so we didn’t have to deal with it. Richard is still like that.”

There is no waiting list for his works. And despite this major retrospective, they generally sell for less than $4,000. But Morris has fans from several generations.

Geoffrey Young, 61, son of bookstore owner Lafayette Young, owns a gallery in Great Barrington, Mass., where he has exhibited Morris’ work. “Richard is something of a wizard,” he says. “His brushwork is incredible. No one, and I mean no one, has a better feeling for paint: the color, the substance, the fluidity, the spot-on rightness of things.”

Novelist Siri Hustvedt, born in 1955, organized a 2004 exhibition of Morris’ work at the Cue Art Foundation in New York. She says of his paintings: “There’s a speed in the gesture that’s really exciting. He’s a great, great colorist.”

Michael Reafsnyder, 35, an L.A. painter known for including smiley faces in his complex abstractions, saw his first Morris painting in 1999. “It was revelatory,” he says. “Bill Boaz, my mentor and professor from Chapman University, always talked about this guy who used to come to campus for a week, stay in the dorms and paint. He was held up as a model of the work ethic. But Bill could never remember his name.

“So when we walked into Morris’ show at Chac Mool Gallery in West Hollywood six years ago, Bill said, ‘This is him.’ ”

They quickly made a trip to San Diego to visit.

Reafsnyder has returned several times. “Visiting his studio does what good painting does: You get sucked into a new world, into another person’s view.”

‘Hunger to create’

Morris’ world is a solitary place devoted to art. Too busy to feel isolated, he says: “I don’t mind being alone. I adopted that pretty early in life. I said, ‘Well geez, if I’m not making any money I better not start a family or get too serious.’ Especially if I said I loved somebody. I mean, you don’t love somebody and put them through this torture.”

Hayward says: “Richard lives an incredibly stoic life. It’s almost as if he has renounced the trappings of contemporary society. He lives so simply, almost like a monk.”

He adds: “Richard lets the paintings do the talking. He is wise. Unpretentious. His ego is under control. It’s almost not there, especially for the genius he is.”

Reed links Morris’ shyness to his being underappreciated. “Richard is elusive,” he says, “but he is not strange in any way. He knows how good his work is, but he’s too modest to push it on others. He’s self-educated, but he is not in any sense an outsider artist.”

As Hustvedt puts it: “Richard is intensely interested in the work of other artists. He’s one of those rare astute people who’s incredibly sophisticated but hasn’t lived in the art world. He’s extremely generous, highly civilized, a real gentleman.”

Hustvedt also suggests that Morris has the visual equivalent of hypergraphia, the compulsion to write, which Dostoevsky is said to have had. “This hunger to create,” she says, “has neurological underpinnings. Richard is a person who has to do it. All real artists have this inner need. It has nothing to do with external reality. Of course, art is always an extension to others, but whether one’s work is embraced or rebuffed is secondary. The need to do it is greater.”

Morris says: “The door is still wide open. I feel kind of young. I’m diabetic, but if you have halfway decent health you’re winning. I wasn’t blessed by genius, but I have kept going. I’ve had a lot of people with whom I’ve shared joy. It blasted me right through a lot of baloney.

“I’ve never stopped to figure it out. I just go from one work to the next.

“It’s not that heady. Just relax with it. If it doesn’t do anything, go on to the next one.”