Creative diversification is critical for ports to successfully get through difficult times - and its pursuit is driving the director of external affairs for the Georgia Ports Authority to new imaginative vistas.
Robert C. Morris, who leads communications efforts for Georgia's ports by day, is, by night, an accomplished watercolorist, carrying on a generations-old tradition of inspiring inventiveness in eras of economic challenge.
A couple years ago, after having retired palette and brush for decades as he concentrated on journalism, Mr. Morris began putting the formal art training of his youth to use again, providing his perspective to Georgia maritime images in paintings that have received acclaim while bringing him a little additional income.
"We need creative minds to look at these [port] facilities we have in different ways, particularly now, as we face the challenges we do," said Mr. Morris, whose brushstrokes capture what he described as "the harmony between this industry and the natural landscape."
Unlike the fact-focused press releases he's been grinding out for the past six years at his port authority day job and the news stories he wrote in prior years with the New Orleans Times-Picayune and Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the paintings demonstrate Mr. Morris' personal perception, applying training he received in high school at Sidwell Friends School in Washington and while studying studio art at Tulane University in New Orleans, from which he earned his journalism degree.
"Now that I've picked the brush up again, it's hard to put it down," Mr. Morris said. In June 2008, a Savannah gallery displayed 20 of his works, and his artistic talents continue to be in demand, including by a publisher who sought him out to illustrate historical writings.
Mr. Morris said being creative in hard times is in his heritage. One of his grandfathers, Joseph Upchurch, while serving as chief of staff to U.S. Sen. Robert Rice Reynolds, D-N.C., pioneered the idea of victory gardens and Army war shows during the Roosevelt administration and later invented what would become the mirrored disco ball. His step-grandfather, Thomas Briggs, founded Welcome Wagon in Memphis in 1928, putting housewives to productive work in their neighborhoods.
Of the late Mr. Upchurch, Mr. Morris said, "My grandfather used to say, 'In times like this, you've got to really think creatively, not only to look at things differently but to engage people.'
"It was," Mr. Morris added, "that kind of creative spirit and thinking that I heard about as a kid and have held near and dear."
