Clayton Morris has always been a dreamer. As a young child, he dreamed of escaping his father’s wrath and violence with his sister Pearl. As an orphan, after his father killed his wife in a drunken rage and then threw himself off the tenement roof to finish the job, he dreamed of being on his own, making his name as an artist. An anonymous patron of the orphanage noted the talent in the bright, fantastical panoramas he depicted on the drab corridor walls and arranged for lessons at the Art Students League down on 57th Street. As a painter, he put his dreams on canvas and began to gain a reputation.

He roomed with two acquaintances at 112 116th Street west of Lenox Avenue, the writer David Thompson and the piano player, Terry Benoit. All three were in their mid-20s, trying to find their place in the vibrant Harlem Renaissance. Then he met Lydia Thorn, a young woman with the face and form of an angel and a voice that could send you to the gates of Paradise. He dreamed of marrying her, which he did.

Terry and David got new lodgings and Lydia and Clay shared some sixteen months of bliss, each urging the other to greater efforts in their art. Lydia sang in the Abyssinian Baptist Church and at rent parties and then began to get paying gigs at various small clubs. Clay sold some pieces and won a couple of prizes and had a show in the offing down in Greenwich Village.

Then a drunk driver--a white man--and his drunk friends came around the corner of Lenox and 116th and smashed all those dreams, striking Lydia, killing Lydia. The driver got a big fine and 30 days in Riker's (suspended) and lost his license for a year.

Clayton went into a spin, avoiding his friends and even Pearl. He was listless and melancholy and drinking (maybe using drugs too. He told his friends that there didn’t seem to be any point with Lydia gone. The couple of times David and Terry went to the apartment were painful. Their friend was obviously not working but also not concerned about money. A patron had come into his life: Aubrey Raeburn, a rich young white man who was taken by Clayton’s talent and prepared to support his work.

Then, as happens, the three friends lost touch.

Clay Morris’s Paintings
The paintings are beautiful, showing a tremendous and growing talent. They are mostly in the impressionistic style with visible brush strokes and open composition, emphasizing accurate depiction and the passage of time and movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience. Many of the subjects are the scenes and people of Harlem, though less formal than similar French-influenced works. These works show the influence of Harlem artists.

But there are other works that are somehow unnerving, illogical; scenes that seem unlike earthly reality: depictions of vibrant jungles, forbidding mountains, seascapes both lyrical and threatening, cities fraught with soaring towers and spires and dark-shadowed alleys. There are strange creatures and people that appear somehow monstrous. All in all, these works seem to call to the viewer’s unconscious, to evoke almost-remembered dreams and fantasies, as though one could step into the paintings and into another world.

Morris has exhibited some of his works at the 135th Street Library on Lenox Avenue.