Dennis Morton didn’t fit the mold, the one I expected while visiting his Laconia art studio.
I went searching for a curmudgeon, a badass, an exterior hard like a turtle’s shell. Instead, I found patience, tranquility, calm, submerged in a smile that shone from both Morton’s mouth and eyes.
I also found stories as layered as his artwork, about famous people he’d met and painted, about travel, about youthful fun and a school of hard knocks that, according to Morton, didn’t turn out to be very hard at all.
“I’ve always been lucky in my life,” Morton told me this week.
Lucky? A 70-year-old man who grew up in orphanages and foster homes? Who never met his real father and barely knew his real mother? Who got busted for dealing cocaine in the 1980s and did time in the state prison? Whose talent – his paintings of prison life and Hawaiian landscapes will blow you away – never amounted to much financially?
Lucky?
That’s what the man said, and that’s how he behaved. He’s got curly silver hair, bronze skin, paint stains on his shirt and shorts, and a vibe like a hammock on a summer afternoon.
Morton and his girlfriend, Maureen Bieniarz, run Imagine Gallery in Laconia’s downtown, selling paintings, teaching art classes, and playing very different roles in their partnership.
She’s the business mind, a painter and photojournalist who stood nearby and looked to edit Morton’s words before I gained her trust and she gave me some room.
Meanwhile, Morton is an open book with no filter, his pages filled with color, like the paintings he does now, of mountains and water and foliage. His work from the 3½ years spent in prison were detailed portraits, about 250 of them, showing inmates, tough cookies whom he befriended through his talent. Several of the paintings are now displayed at the prison in Concord.
“I was in with heavy guys, and if anything happened to me, they would cover my ass,” Morton told me. “I was very lucky like that.”
There’s that word again, the one that runs counter to a lifestyle that sounded pretty unlucky to me. Morton was born in West Virginia shortly after the end of World War II, to a white mother and black father, the product of a one-night stand. At the time, this was taboo.
“My mother told me recently that she put Jones on the birth certificate so they would not go after my father,” Morton said. “Back then, that was lynching time.”
From there, Morton moved from the South to Pittsburgh to New York City, from orphanages to foster homes, changing last names like a pair of socks.
Here, finally, I figured I had my tale of tragedy, my column about the little boy who lost his way, got abused, grew up lonely, became angry.
Nope. Morton loved his foster homes, finding love on a farm from a woman named Grandma Wieks, and more love later from the Muller family, who, along with their three daughters, took Morton to the fast-food restaurants of the day, featuring waitresses roller skating to cars, ala Happy Days.
Morton enjoyed the orphanages and later showed me his painting of one in Pittsburgh, a classic old castle-like structure called The Pressley House.
“One of the best times of my life,” Morton said. “There was pigeon crap all over the place, but there were big rooms and great counselors. We had roller skating passes and played softball every day.”
One day the kids went to the zoo, and it was there that 10-year-old Morton saw a woman sketching a lion.
“I got interested in art,” Morton said. “So I took a pad and started sketching.”
His final last name came from a man named Hugh Morton of New York City, who adopted the boy and then moved his family to Keene. Dennis met an artist named Richard Whitney at Keene High School.
Perhaps you’ve heard of him. If not, Town and Country magazine named Whitney one of the top 12 portrait painters in the country, and his work hangs in more than 750 public and private fine art collections worldwide.
Whitney mentored and guided Morton at his studio and, more than anyone else, is responsible for Morton’s skill and passion today. The two painted together, teacher and student.
“We’re very close,” Whitney said by phone from his home in Stoddard. “He’s a wonderful artist.”
Their relationship coincided with the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s. Morton went to Woodstock. He fathered two boys out of wedlock. And, later, he snorted lots of cocaine while working at the Black Tavern Restaurant in Keene.
When he needed money for child support, he began dealing cocaine. That’s why the cops busted down his door on Sept. 17, 1984, seizing 9 ounces of coke.
It’s why he was sentenced to prison for 3½ years, why he began painting portraits seriously, and why several of his paintings now hang in the state prison in Concord.
More luck followed Morton in prison. First, the captain of the guards happened to be a man named Chris Metalious, who happened to be the son of Grace Metalious, who happened to be the author of the book Peyton Place.
According to Morton, Metalious gave him the materials he needed to paint. “I don’t know why he was behind me so much,” Morton told me. “He made it possible for me to get oils. Maybe it was his mother being into the arts and being a writer. I don’t know.”
Research told me that Metalious was a state prison guard in New Hampshire and has since moved to Florida, and I found a number listed under his name in Naples. No one answered there, though, but Whitney confirmed Morton’s story.
“Yep,” Whitney said.
As a loyal friend, Whitney had no plans to reveal that Morton had done time, but when I mentioned it and said Morton was up front about it, off he went.
Whitney visited Morton in prison and critiqued his work. “I brought supplies whenever possible,” Whitney said. “He made the most of his three years. He had a very productive time.”
Whitney has painted eight state governors and former secretary of the Navy James Webb, whose portrait hangs in the Pentagon, his tie painted by Morton. Whitney stored some of Morton’s prison work, which was shown at the State House in 1988 before it was transferred to the state prison.
Morton earned $18,000 for that, and his yearly trips to Hawaii, where one of his sons lives, produced a landscape that sold for $8,000.
Hawaii has opened doors for Morton. It’s where he met and painted Patricia Hastie, who played George Clooney’s comatose wife in The Descendants. For proof, he played a voice mail from Hastie, a Hawaiian resident.
“This is Patty Hastie,” the voice says. “I do have the portrait. You did a fantastic job. I enjoyed the time we spent together doing that.”
Morton also painted Glen Campbell and his wife, and has the print to prove it. But as Whitney said, “We all struggle. Most painters struggle.”
The studio opened last summer. Morton and Bieniarz have been dating for two years and live together in Laconia. She compared his prison portraits with his Hawaiian landscapes, saying, “His work from prison is more detailed.”
On the studio walls, you’ll find paintings of hardened criminals. There’s Jack the Rat and Tony and Butch and Sudsy and Denny and Frank and Guitar Johnny. They’re playing guitar, playing chess, looking over the wall near the guard tower, doing time, passing time.
When Morton goes back in his mind, his eyes look hard, not seeing what he’s actually looking at, but seeing a lot nonetheless.
“I think I did some of my best work in prison,” he said. “Sometimes, I feel like I’m one of the luckiest people around.”