On a recent chilly spring morning, Burton Morris is standing beside the colorful, iconic paintings that line the walls of his Monroeville art studio, doing his best to captivate a group of sleepy-looking high-schoolers.

His affect is modest, but his words are aimed squarely at whatever part of the teenage brain wakes up at the sound of a name dropping.

"I was fortunate enough to be the artist for the 76th annual Academy Awards," he tells 60 students from Downtown's Creative and Performing Arts High School, who are sprawled on couches and the floor around him.

Silence. It is only 10 a.m., after all.

"I was chosen as the artist for the Olympics in 2004," he goes on hopefully, and then, without missing a beat: "I just finished up a big project with Kanye West, the rapper. I was at his house not that long ago. I created 10 big paintings of the Jetsons, who he really likes. He feels like he's George Jetson."

Someone -- an adult -- chuckles. The Jetson reference has sailed right over the heads of these teens, but at the mention of the hip-hop star, the alertness level in the room rises perceptibly.

"Do you have kids?" asks one student. The recently remarried Morris says no, not yet, but he will -- probably triplets, he adds, to giggles from the group -- before moving seamlessly back on message.

"You have to understand, my work is very kid-friendly, and my book just came out a few months ago. Please take a look and pass it around."

This has been a tough crowd, but Morris has finally woken them up, pushed the product and closed the sale -- as he has countless times throughout his remarkable career, thanks to a mix of unflagging self-promotion, likability, talent and hard work.

The 44-year-old Churchill native is that rare thing: a hugely successful commercial artist whose work has brought up to $120,000 -- at an event benefiting tennis star Andre Agassi's foundation -- and hangs in the homes of private collectors all over the world, alongside

Picasso and Keith Haring and Roy Lichtenstein (as he'll be the first to tell you).

Rarer still, he is a Pittsburgher who lives in Los Angeles, but actually comes back every other month to his hometown, where he keeps an apartment in Shadyside, along with his Monroeville warehouse, which serves as both gallery and work space for him.

Besides meeting with CAPA students during his March visit, Morris hosted a "paint-a-thon" for children for a Juvenile Diabetes Foundation fund-raiser and delivered a lecture on his work at the Duquesne Club, where he also signed copies of his new book, "Burton Morris Pop!" a retrospective of his work, and he'll be back next month to help Children's Hospital plan art for its new facility in Lawrenceville. His mother, a former physical education and health teacher at Allderdice High School, lives here; his second wife, Sara, grew up here, and he has many friends here.

"He's a normal, nice, sweet kind of person, who works very hard and is happy with who he is," says Steve Mendelson, who -- since founding the Mendelson Gallery in Shadyside more than 30 years ago -- has shown Morris' work a number of times in the past, and considers him a friend.

"I sort of mentored him," said Mendelson. "He would ask me advice about how to think beyond Pittsburgh. But he also valued Pittsburgh and he understood the hometown advantage."

If the booming 1990s needed an iconic work of art, perhaps it could be Morris' Absolut Vodka ad, or the coffee cup prominently displayed on the set of the hit TV show "Friends." His work perfectly caught the post-Pop-Art era: a martini glass, a ketchup bottle, a baseball pitcher, reinterpreted in bold, colorful, cartoony shapes, images that lift the spirit but make few demands on the viewer.

No serious critic in the art world considers Morris' work "fine art," whatever that may be, although he says he is moving beyond the simple images of his early years. A recent series of canvases depicting objects on a night table "are a little more complex instead of one big image in your face," noted Mr. Mendelson.

"It's the next generation of pop art," says Karl Salatka, a Lower Burrell resident who attended the Duquesne Club lecture and collects his work. "It's accessible. These are actually comments on images by the original masters of pop art, Lichtenstein, Warhol, but he's using a different color palate, a little more tongue-in-cheek. Every artist is an homage to previous artists, and his is an homage to pop art."

Some local artists believe Morris' work owes a great debt to the late Robert Patla, a graphic artist at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in the 1980s. Patla's art incorporated the same kind of energetic scoring and slashing black lines -- but in a decidedly gloomier vein. Indeed, Donald Miller, retired senior editor and art critic for the Post-Gazette, says both artists may have been inspired by the "gloomies" -- tiny woodcut prints -- salted into the lengthy articles in the New York Review of Books.

"I knew Bob Patla, and he was brilliant," says Morris. "But he had a different edge to his work. My work is a little more upbeat. Did someone like him influence me? Sure he did, as did Keith Haring, as did Rockwell Kent, as did Albrecht Durer from 500 years ago, who influenced Bob, who in turn influenced me."

In his introduction to Morris' new book, Miller praises his work, but thinks Morris could grow as an artist -- that in some ways, he may be too tied to his background as an illustrator.

"I keep urging Burton to create his own new idiom," said Miller in an interview last week from his home in Florida. "He's been doing what he's been doing for a very long time and has been very successful at it. He needs to grow, take some more risks, because he's established his style already.

"When you think of [Keith] Haring, he was able to continue inventing, and that is the mark of a master," says Miller. "The great artist never stays locked in one style."

Perhaps, he added, "Burton is truly an illustrator at heart. The difference between illustration and fine art has to do with a narrative, and in Burton's case there is no story written down. He does use an image as a symbol, but it doesn't go deeply enough."

Morris also may have had the bad timing to come after the pop artists of the 1960s, and that is why he probably will never achieve the critical accolades accorded Andy Warhol, notes Tom Sokolowski, president of the Andy Warhol Museum.

"The artists who think of something first are always considered the great ones, the pioneers," says Sokolowski, who likes Morris but thinks his art needs to be more edgy, "a little darker. When he did that poster for Major League Baseball's All-Star Game a few years ago, if he'd maybe put something in about baseball's problems, steroids, that would have been a step in the right direction."

Morris laughs at that notion.

"Look, I wanted to give something back to Pittsburgh, and I wanted to be seen in a positive light. When you work with Major League Baseball, you can't throw steroids in there."

Morris keeps talking about changing and growing, rattling off a list of projects -- "big new ideas" -- that include a show in Rome in September, and at a museum at Hofstra University on Long Island next year.

While working on a number of private commissions, he's also planning to license a line of watches and specialty wine labels featuring his designs -- he's already done a line of silk ties and sunglasses -- and he's talking to television executives about new ideas for showcasing his artwork.

But will Morris ever change enough to become the critics' darling?

It doesn't look likely.

"People say, 'Oh, why don't you be a little more controversial, take on subjects like war and politics?' Well, right now I'm creating things in the way I see my world, things that are a little more upbeat. There's so much there that's negative out there. Anyone can do work about things happening around the world, but I want to bring about art that speaks in a more inspiring, optimistic way. Don't get me wrong, I want my work to be universal. "

"It doesn't matter what kind of artist you are, you still have to get your name out and promote your work. There may be those artists who spend the whole day and don't need to get discovered, but in the end, I need to make a living."