“Salon Rouge” by Patsy Howell in the Morris’ dining room. earned a break when their daughter was six weeks old, just after her husband had landed his first teaching job at Notre Dame. “It’s as if our home has always been her canvas … because she has an aesthetic sensibility,” he says. Morris thinks there’s a deep spiritual need for beauty and con-siders the need among the four dimensions of the human experi-ence he explores in his book, “If Aristotle Ran General Motors.” “I grew up deprived of any normal satisfaction of that need,” he says. “As soon as I could, at the age of 12, I became a musi-cian, because that’s a form of beauty.” Growing up in Durham, North Carolina, in a household in which there was no connection to art, he says he found beauty in music and also at Duke Gardens where he and friends played Frisbee among the rolling hills and beautiful flowers. A Morehead Scholar and the first in his family to attend col-lege, Morris studied some history of modern art at the University of North Carolina. “I got the bug. Once I was exposed, especially to modern art, where you could just go on with color and form and energy — and that connected to the kind of music I liked — it was almost as if it was me discovering myself, my having the great self knowl-edge: ‘I love this stuff,’” he says. During the Chapel Hill years, Tom Morris bought art supplies and created his own paintings. “It never even occurred to me that I could go out and buy other people’s stuff,” he says. “I would do these wild, vibrant pri-mary color paintings just to have them around.” The Morrises were drawn into the high art world when they lived in New Haven, Connecticut, during Tom’s grad school studies at Yale. Attending fine art shows in New York, they often came home with an exhibition poster, which they framed inex-pensively. Later they graduated into signed lithograph prints. When they moved to Wilmington, Tom and Mary Morris began the collection they live with today. They possessed that confidence Kennedy detects when people visit New Elements Gallery and like those fortunate people to have art color their young lives, the Morrises introduced their son and daughter to art, and also their granddaughter, now age 10, is showing signs of her own artistic expression. “When our granddaughter was an infant, we’d take her around to each painting, holding her in our arms, and give her the name of the piece or what it was about. She’d point before she could talk. My wife is a textile artist and our daughter is a photogra-pher and our son is a filmmaker and photographer,” Morris says. “That’s what results when people are surrounded by art.” 34 WBM december 2014
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