The office walls at Hampton Affiliates are alive with color. Bold abstract paintings on oversized canvases compete for attention in the lobby on the second floor of a West Portland building, and colorful, modern works, mostly by Northwest artists, proceed down the hall. Mixed media, photographs, and scores of paintings greet the eye at every turn.

"This is by my wife, Carol," says John Hampton, the second generation of timber mill-owning Hamptons and chairman of the 63-year-old company, pointing to a spare, modern painting with subdued colors. "I call it her linear period."

Speaking with characteristic deliberate enunciation and obvious pride, he turns the corner: "And I did these," he says with a smile, nodding toward a series of simple, Ellsworth Kelly-inspired, color block collages, each a slightly different arrangement of three primary colors.

On the eve of his 80th birthday, poised to receive the Association of Fundraising Professionals Vollum Award for Lifetime Philanthropic achievement, and in the midst of a battle with cancer, John Hampton's love of art remains irrepressible.

Chairman of the Northwest Forest Resource Council during the height of the northern spotted owl wars, Hampton is a seminal figure in the story of Oregon's timber economy. But it's the state's arts community that has gratefully absorbed much of the man's time, money and passion.

Especially over the last decade. It was Hampton who led Portland Opera's $25 million campaign and made sure the company was firmly on the road to financial stability. When the Portland Art Museum wanted to buy a collection of modern art from the widow of art critic Clement Greenberg, the Hamptons stepped up. Hampton also helped form the Oregon Arts Heritage Endowment Fund and the Oregon Cultural Trust, ongoing sources of funding for the arts.

Along with his wife of 55 years, Carol Hampton, John has supported other causes. He opens his wallet for Camp Meriwether, the Boy Scout camp near Cape Lookout, and the Oregon Food Bank. But above all he is committed to the arts. "One can be too dispersed and not really make an impact," he says.

Not him.

John Hampton understands that art isn't just beautiful but an economic opportunity. "Oregon is 49th in the country for arts and culture funding," Hampton says. "Instead of diminishing our support, we ought to give them more. Those who participate in the arts are the ones who start businesses. To attract those kinds of people here, you need to invest in the arts."

L.M. "BUD" HAMPTON GOT INTO THE TIMBER BUSINESS by accident. John Hampton's father owned a retail lumber business in Tacoma but World War II dried up his supply. So he took matters into his own hands by buying a mill in Oregon.

His early missteps almost led to the loss of that initial investment, but the company recovered. Today that first mill, Hampton's flagship in Willamina, is one of the largest softwood lumber producers in the United States. Hampton Affiliates, with 1,600 employees in Oregon, Washington and California, ranked No. 3 in the 2005 Oregon Business Private 150. Its overall lumber production was 308 million board feet in 1985, and will come in at around 1.45 billion board feet in 2005.

Joining the family business after college at the University of Washington (B.S., economics) and a brief tour in the U.S. Navy, Hampton started on the night shift at the mill. Eventually he launched a lumber trading business for his father at a time when rising lumber prices virtually guaranteed his venture would meet with success.

In the mid-1970s, well mentored by his father, he took over at the top of the organizational chart.

"My father was very enthusiastic. He had an innate intelligence. He was learning the business as he went," Hampton says. "He had no experience with planning. We have been close to broke three times and it was always because my father had some kind of an expansion plan."

Hampton led the company through the tumultuous late '80s when the environmental movement, the Endangered Species Act and, later, the Clinton Forest Plan drastically changed the timber industry's fate and effectively cut timber harvests in Oregon in half. The turn of events still makes him sputter. "It's pathetic what's happened with the national forests. A waste of the country's resources."

In the regulated environment, Hampton's new causes include educating the public about the economic benefits of harvesting timber and the promise that sustainable forest management will deliver the best of all worlds. He's also been proactive in helping the industry regulate itself to avoid being regulated by lawmakers.

"He saw the impact of the spotted owl and the Endangered Species Act on the industry and the polarizing effect it had in rural Oregon. When the salmon were considered for listing, he thought there had to be a better way," says Gail Achterman, director of Oregon State University's Institute for Natural Resources and legal counsel during the Oregon Business Council's work in the late '90s on a salmon restoration plan.

Hampton helped craft the Oregon Salmon Plan, which gave timberland owners the opportunity to take matters into their own hands through stream restoration and forest management.

But while Hampton — who happens to be a passionate fly fisherman — has led the industry in pushing sustainable forestry practices, he's stalwart in his opposition to any new regulation. Last year's ballot measure to set aside swaths of the Tillamook and Clatsop forests for conservation met with fierce resistance from Hampton and his timber industry compatriots.

"He's a formidable adversary," says Guido Rahr, president and CEO of the Wild Salmon Center and supporter of the ballot measure. "We definitely disagreed, but I honor his passion and his ability to succeed."

THE COMPANY WAS EVERYTHING to the Hampton family when he was growing up, says John Hampton's oldest son Jamey, co-creative director of Portland modern dance company BodyVox. "There was never a time I can remember that he wasn't getting calls at home," he says.

But there was also always music. John Hampton would put on a swing record and dance with Carol in the living room. A trombone player in college, he'd turn up Frank Sinatra's Fly Me to the Moon and say, "Listen to the horns just rip!" Carol, a painter and printmaker whose light-filled studio sits behind sliding doors off the dining room, made sure the children were exposed to the arts — from opera on the radio to dance performances downtown.

Today, the 3,600-square-foot mid-century modern home in the West Hills is quieter than when it housed the Hamptons' four children. On a recent afternoon, Hampton napped through the nasty effects of chemotherapy, his toes-up stocking feet just visible through a door off the living room.

Carol Hampton, a gracious hostess despite back pain caused by Parkinson's disease, sat down in their living room to talk about her role in the Hampton family. She spoke sparingly about their relationship, focusing mostly on the children. "He told me I had beautiful babies, that I should have more," says Carol, who delivered two sons and two daughters, who've in turn had 10 grandchildren among them.

The couple started their art collection through the Portland Art Museum's Rental Sales Gallery. Their home art is similar to that of Hampton's offices: works by Michele "Mike" Russo, Lucinda Parker, Carol Hampton and others.

Carol and her husband disagree on two points. While John Hampton gives all the credit for his love of art to his wife, she'd like to see more family money go elsewhere. "I think people are so much more important than the arts," she says. "I'd like to give money to causes that would change the way the United States is heading."

Which brings up the other point. John Hampton, a fishing buddy of Vice President Dick Cheney, is a strong supporter of President George W. Bush. Carol is no fan of the Republican Party under Bush and worries often about the fate of the country. "It's okay, we just disagree," says Carol. "We don't talk much about politics. We're so polarized, we don't get far."

DRAWN TO THE SWEEPING EMOTIONAL NARRATIVE of opera, John Hampton is both fan and champion.

After leading the charge on the Portland Opera's five-year $25 million fund-raising campaign that wrapped up in 2003, Hampton learned that the opera's budget that year was up against a significant shortfall.

"John basically said, 'Not on my watch,'" says Ellen Bussing, former development director for the opera. He pulled four other people into a room and got them to agree to a crazy strategy: find 25 people to give $25,000 each. He wrote the first check.

"We ended up with 18 [donors], and John brought in 16 of them," Bussing says. "We balanced the budget by the skin of our teeth." The last donor faxed in an agreement from a golf club at 5 p.m. on the last day of the fiscal year. "He loves to be successful," Bussing says of Hampton. "He's an adrenaline junkie."

John and Carol were also there in 2000 when the Portland Art Museum was looking to buy the Clement Greenberg collection, now the centerpiece of the museum's new Jubitz Center for Modern and Contemporary Art. Along with Tom and Gretchen Holce the Hamptons helped bankroll the several-million-dollar purchase and funded the printing of a catalog for its debut exhibit in 2001.

"They're very smart and very strategic thinkers, and they love art," says John Buchanan, museum executive director, who approached them when the acquisition became an option. "They said, 'We really understand this. This would be great for Portland.'"

Hampton's first arts post was on the board of the local chapter of Young Audiences, supporter of arts education in schools, to which he made a $25 donation, his first. "You find out that it doesn't really hurt," he says.

After stepping down from the CEO spot and becoming chairman of Hampton Affiliates in 1995, Hampton has been able to focus more time on the arts. But the lung cancer diagnosis he received last February has forced him to slow down.

His current chemotherapy regimen at Providence Cancer Center is a once-every-three-weeks ordeal that leaves him feeling very ill for the first week, quite sick the next and slightly better the next. "Then they shoot you down again," says Carol Hampton.

"You learn to live with it," John Hampton says about his cancer. But his younger son, David, assistant timberlands manager with Hampton Affiliates, says that the hardest part for his father is being held back. "There's nothing he wants to do more than be involved."

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Copyright 2005 Oregon Business magazine