She sat for me on Sundays, and I painted her in the hat that I had purchased in Italy. I was in love with a beautiful Hungarian girl named Katherine Vietorisz, and wanted to paint her portrait.

I had the memory of Rubens, Frans Hals, Van Dyck, and the Italians fresh in my mind. I had a small studio of my own and wanted to develop more personal ideas away from the influence of Gammell and the Boston impressionists. Soon after I returned, we went to Provincetown, on Cape Cod, where Gammell painted during the summers. In Italy, I bought a rather picturesque hat that I thought would make an attractive prop. In the spring of 1955, while I was still working with him, I traveled to Europe to study the Old Masters. Concerning portraits, did you do more than head studies with Ives Gammell? Without this foundation I would have accomplished little of worth as an artist. I owe the foundation of the painter’s art, the ability to “see,” to my training with Ives Gammell. These are tall orders for even the most experienced painter, but unless these principles are emphasized again and again to young students, they will consistently produce work that is nothing more than a chaotic collection of carefully rendered pieces. Gammell continually stressed seeing the parts in relation to the whole. Gammell’s teaching reflected the Boston painter’s concern for, and emphasis upon, getting “the notes” or correct color value relationships, of what you were painting. They’re the principles of visual impressionism: getting the “big look,” carefully separating light and shadow, drawing and spotting the large masses, and refining only after the shapes and values are correctly observed and put down.

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.

Portrait painter with canvas