Acrobat-Turned-Artist Inspired by a High Life

Even before Ken Morgan could walk or talk, he was doing breathtaking stunts high above the ground with his two brothers and a sister in his father’s touring acrobatic act.

Morgan, 52, is an artist now, but his formative years were shaped by the circus and his father’s passion to found a family dynasty with his sons: a troupe called Al Morgan and His Toy Boys.

As a prospective founding father, sort of an aspiring Joseph Kennedy of the circus world, Al Morgan hoped that either with his sons--Ken, Al Jr. and Bill--or with his sons’ sons, the Morgans would hit the big time in the big top. (Daughter Mary Jane didn’t get any billing in the strictly boys-and-men world of the time.)

“When I was only 6 or 7 months old, my father would put us in a washtub welded to a perch pole and hold us aloft by balancing the perch pole on his head,” Morgan says.

With his close-cropped hair, barrel chest and burly 6-foot-plus frame, the onetime lithe pole percher today looks more like a retired NFL linebacker. He seems to enjoy sitting and reminiscing in the abandoned gym his father built many years ago, converting a barn behind the family home in Coventry, Conn., for his glorious Toy Boys.

With fading photos of the robustly athletic Morgans of yesteryear beaming down from its walls, the dusty gym is cluttered with relics from the circus family’s past: perch poles, unicycles, teeterboards, clubs and an array of acrobatic paraphernalia the act used to balance on, juggle with or propel themselves from.

For the first 20 years of his life, Morgan says, he honed his acrobatic skills in long, grueling practices in the hot, claustrophobic gym. His father, an ex-Marine, ran the all-work-and-no-play sessions with military efficiency. Balanced with those countless hours of toil, tears and sweat were moments of glory in public performances under the tent and on TV shows such as “Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour” and “Bozo the Clown.”

And those hard-earned triumphs came everywhere the Morgan family touched down, from obscure burgs in Maine to Boston Garden and New York City’s Madison Square Garden.

“Doing a couple handstands or headstands on the perch pole in a show was always much easier than the rigorous drills our father put us through right here after school and on the weekends. The shows went like clockwork, and we’d do a couple handstands. It was easy. But here you’d practice handstands for six hours at a time,” Morgan says.

No matter how emotionally and intellectually distant the artist may have felt from his circus experiences, their imprint never went away.

In fact, his past dramatically resurfaced not long ago when circus images began emerging in his paintings and drawings. These unconscious remembrances of circuses past have forever altered his view of his art, his life and his complex relationship with his proud, dominant father.

His odd epiphany through art began after his father’s death Oct. 21, 1994, at age 70, from prostate cancer. Around that time, Morgan, an artist perpetually in quest of something original in his work, was wrestling with his own creative demons, paring his art to the bone. Like an alchemist obsessed with discovering a magic formula, Morgan experimented over and over until he reduced his work to dots and lines.

At first, the images emerging from his spare, intense, abstract marks on canvas and paper had him puzzled. They looked familiar and as vivid as a brilliant dream image that lights up fleetingly in sleep, then quickly fades as you wake.

In one of those rare electrifying moments, Morgan went from puzzlement to enlightenment. In an instant, he saw clearly that these patterns were related to the circus. His vigorous line drawings suggested tightropes, trapezes, trampolines, cannons, even a kind of field force analogous to the energy expended by acrobats, clowns, high-wire acts and by ballyhooing ringmasters.

“I started to see things in the nothingness. And what I saw were all the circus riggings, all the guide wires. It was like a cleansing. It was like starting all over again,” Morgan says. All those long-repressed circus images were set free from their psychic cages after his father’s death, and Morgan wondered why.

“When I was in art school and my teachers heard about my past link with acrobatics and the circus, they wanted to push me into painting about it. I refused, because the circus was strictly my father’s thing,” he says.

“Once he died, I felt like I had inherited these circus themes legitimately Now they can be passed on to me as part of my legacy from my father.”

In many ways, Morgan has himself been liberated, especially in his deeper understanding of his father’s life and what he now sees as bonds between the acrobat father and the artist son.

Just as his art and passion is painting, he now sees that his father’s art, his passion, was acrobatics.

And just as he will do anything to support his art and family, so did his father in his day in his way.

“My father was a lineman for Hartford Electric Light Co. for 35 years, but his real love was acrobatics and the circus,” Morgan says. “He’d come home from work at 4:30, bring us right out here into the gym.... He just couldn’t wait to get home from work to do what he really loved to do.”

The Morgans never tried to go full-tilt and grab for the brass ring of success in the circus world because the boys’ mother, Dorothy, stressed other priorities.

So Al Morgan and His Toy Boys stayed in Coventry and tailored their road time to fit the demands of school schedules. Every summer, the four siblings, Dad and Mom packed their civilian clothes, acrobatic gear and sequined costumes, shut down their Coventry home and hit the sawdust trail throughout New England and points beyond in the 1950s and ‘60s.

All of Ken Morgan’s deeply felt experiences as a young acrobat were almost three decades behind him when the circus images started popping up in his art. By then, he had been married for many years, had two sons and had enjoyed a windfall from sales of his paintings during the great art boom of the 1980s. After the boom busted, Morgan, like so many other artists, landed on hard economic times.

Today, as an established but still struggling painter, he has won important prizes, including the prestigious Pollock-Krasner Award. The going rate for a Morgan ranges from $1,500 to $6,000 and more, he says. “But I’ve had it so hard that I don’t even care if they sell,” he says.

“Painting is my passion.... I don’t paint the pretty pictures that everybody wants to buy. I paint pictures that confuse people.”

Morgan’s works are extremely physical, even rough-hewn pieces that mix gritty lyricism with a visceral kind of elegance. And now his circus paintings--works that cloak unsettling images behind flaps of slashed canvas--are even more confrontational, with voyeuristic glimpses into the dark side of the sideshow world of illusion and the impishly perverse.

Thanks to his reconnection with his circus past, he realizes that his father--who objected to Ken’s decision to go to art school--was an artist in his own right.

“He had compromised his life’s dream by going to work for 35 years at a regular day job rather than pursuing the circus life full time, the way I’ve pursued art. And he regretted it.”

Ken reflects for only a split second when asked if he loved his father. After all, he was a taskmaster who , had dictated a career choice for Ken from infancy until Ken’s declaration of independence at age 20.

“Greatly,” Morgan answers with a son’s pride. “He had a big fist, but his heart was twice as big, and he showed me both. And I understood both.”

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Owen McNally writes for the Hartford Courant, a Tribune company.