His training included head studies that emphasized the principles and methods employed by the Boston artists.Ī. If someone with a trained eye carefully examines Paxton’s The Italian Girl, Tarbell’s Justice Hammond, or DeCamp’s Portrait of Theodore Roosevelt, they will see what fine portrait painters these men were. Boston painters such as William Paxton (Gammell’s teacher), Edmund Tarbell, and Joseph DeCamp were among the finest American portrait painters of their generation. Through Gammell, I was extremely fortunate to tap into the Boston tradition. Did his training adequately prepare you for painting portraits?Ī. The portrait was received enthusiastically and I was hooked! But none will ever match my first real “commission.” When I was sixteen, a high school friend, an aspiring ventriloquist, commissioned me to paint an oil portrait of him from life, for the then enormous sum of $25. My interest in art always included portraiture, and it has contributed to my success over the years. When did you first become interested in portraiture?Ī. In 1999 I spent an afternoon in Lack’s studio and questioned him about his portraiture and the art of portrait painting. Lack’s portraits of Minnesota governors Wendell Anderson and Albert Quie hang in the Minnesota State Capitol.ĭuring his later career Lack limited his portraiture to family members, and devoted most of his time and energy to painting figurative works based on ideas formulated by the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, the founder of analytical psychology. Since then he painted many prominent Minnesotans in the fields of law, medicine, business, education, and religion. He began his career by painting six portraits for the Joseph P. Consequently, throughout his long career, Richard Lack was a highly sought-after portrait artist. Abstract Expressionist, Cubist, or childishly executed portraits do not appeal to most people. In our present iconoclastic art world, where anything that has been done before is apt to be labeled irrelevant, the skilled portrait painter is still in demand. To survive, the portrait painter must be talented, flexible, thick-skinned, and tenacious: talented enough to meet the artistic and creative demands of fine portraiture, flexible enough to balance artistic ideals with the realities of the profession in the modern world, thick-skinned enough to take the unreasonable demands and criticism that sometimes come from hard-to-please clients, and tenacious enough to stick with it in spite of the stress involved. Portrait painting is a difficult and sometimes exasperating art.
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