“To help sustain my schooling and to continue to work as an artist, I have been, at various times, a truck driver in California fruit groves, a wheelbarrow pusher on the Chicago breakwater, a superintendent of a crew of lifeboat builders, a carpenter and a teacher.

Often, when confronting a blank canvas, the artist engages in a long and silent conversation. The idea inspires the artist; the artist creates the idea. The challenge is to make visual that which has never existed, except in the mind.

Perhaps it is fortunate that total satisfaction is never reached in a single canvas, for each one spawns another and the search goes on.”

"Carl A. Morris (1911 – 1993) was born in Yorba Linda, California and he studied at the Chicago Art Institute and in Parisand Vienna. He opened the Spokane Art Center through the Federal Art Project during the Great Depression. He met his wife, sculptor Hilda Grossman(Deutsch) when he recruited her as a teacher for the center. Other notable teachers at the center include Guy Anderson and Clyfford Still. Moving to Seattle in 1940, they met Mark Tobey and became lifelong friends. In 1941, he was commissioned to paint murals for the Eugene, Oregon post office. The Morrises settled in Portland, Oregon and established important and influential artistic careers. They often visited New York to see friends such as Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Joseph Campbell and Lionel Trilling but declined to relocate, wanting to avoid what they saw as a climate of commercialism and artistic distraction. Morris is known today for his strong Abstract Impressionist paintings, and has been called one of Oregon's most important artists.

His work can be seen in collections throughout the U.S., including those of the Portland Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Reed College, the Boise Art Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art."