Richard Lee Bland: Portrait of a Painter

by Charles McGuigan 08.2002

I have an image of Richard Bland from Bicentennial Summer. Late July, the air textured with humidity. He is wearing shorts, and his legs are brown and spindly. The vest he wears is covered with daubs of oil paint and his hair is like a wild cloud spun of copper that hovers above him. He is in front of his easel, facing the vanishing point down a Fan alley that is lined with crape myrtles in full bloom, the flowers rich as raspberry sherbet. His brush moves from pallet to canvas, grating and scratching on the flat open surface as he works in the oils. Gradually the canvas fills with colors and shapes and the alley is re-formed in two dimensions, a permanent record of that specific place in that flash of a moment.

Ubiquitous.

That’s Richard Bland.

Always recording nature and the subtle and dramatic changes of whatever environment he finds himself in. A chronicler. A recorder. His paintings document slivers of our continuum.

We’re sitting in his carriage house in the enclosed porch on the second floor, overlooking the alley, but the windows, old sashes hinged to a framework, are completely covered in Virginia creeper. You have to peer through the leaves to look outside. But there it is: the alleyway between Plum and Lombardy and Floyd and Grove; in the heart of the Fan, this system of a few blocks that has been the artist’s orbit for about three decades.

Cultural Artifacts

His house is as unconventional as his life. It is a rich, textured amalgamation of all sorts of cultural artifacts, from old commercial signs to a few fire hydrants. You name it and chances are you’ll find it at Richard’s. A catalogue of all that he possess in this lofty space would surpass the entries of “The Doomsday Book”. It is a sort of museum, but there is no order to it. The pieces flow together, and not necessarily rhythmically.

Somewhere in there is a stuffed black squirrel from Central Park in New York, the bills of two giant blue marlins, scores of wooden forms from an old foundry. Old glass photographs and postcards, and fabrics hung from ceilings and walls, and carpets laid one on top of the other. Part of the place has always reminded me of a Bedouin chamber. Another part, downstairs, is absolutely cavernous. There’s an old printing press there and drawers filled with old wooden type. This is the sort of place Home and Garden  TV ought to profile. There’s nothing else like it on this planet: it is as singular as its owner.

Raised In North Carolina

Born in Hendersonville, North Carolina, the youngest of four boys, Richard Lee Bland spent his formative years in Goldsboro, North Carolina, which straddles the fall line and the barbecue line. To the east of that imaginary barbecue line is where the good stuff comes from, with its base of vinegar and hot peppers. “In Goldsboro,” says Richard, “there was Wilbur’s Barbecue.”

Richard’s father, Bill Bland, was a state forester. He served as a Second Lieutenant through World War II, saw some of the most violent action any human being has ever witnessed. He fought in North Africa. He landed at the Anzio beachhead, which proved very costly in terms of Allied casualties. He and another man were the only survivors of the 36th Infantry Division at Monte Cassino. “My father’s dead now,” says Richard. “But I’m always very proud of him. A huge chunk of my life has been spent to honor my father. During World War Two, he saw unspeakable horrors and he continued in his leadership role throughout the war, but he didn’t talk about the horror he saw. He and his devoted, loving wife raised a healthy family in a dysfunctional society.”

When Bill Bland returned stateside, he and his wife Dot moved to Hendersonville, not far from Asheville, tucked deep in the mountains of North Carolina. They started their family there. First came Bob, then several years later, the twins, Tom and Bill. And two years after that, Richard was born.

When the family moved outside of Goldsboro, Bill Bland, the elder, raised small pine trees for reforestation projects. He designed the family house, a sprawling rancher covered in green shingles with a massive screened-in porch. A creek ran through the front yard. Beyond the fields where the saplings were planted, were warehouses that contained large bales of sphagnum moss, which was used to ship the plants. The boys would sometimes build massive forts out of the light weight bales of moss.

Straddling City And Country

Until third grade, Richard attended Rosewood Elementary, a small country school not far from the Bland household. His parents, though, noticed that Richard was picking up slang words and a molasses drawl from his classmates. “I was coming home talking like country people,” Richard says.

So his parents moved him to school in Goldsboro. Each day they would drive him the eight miles to Virginia Street School and later William Street School. Early in his life, Richard got a chance to see two different cultures existing side by side. He remembers exploring the edges of the woods not far from his home and crossing the wide fields where the saplings grew. Women wearing great bonnets, perched on stools, would pick weeds from around the saplings or the cover crops of soybean. They wore light summer dresses and would sing songs and gossip. “It was only natural for me to take a beeline to the ladies and they were always so pleasant and they greeted me,” he remembers. “It was wonderful to be near such a joyful bunch of people.”

There was also a man who would come to the fields with a loaded shotgun. He was a Korean War vet and when flocks of birds filled the tree farm, this man would discharge a round scaring off the birds. He wore an old military-issue cap and when he removed it, locks of dark hair would spill down to below his shoulders. “He was a curiosity,” says Richard. “In those days people didn’t have long hair.”

Richard remembers an old mule he and his brothers would ride through the fields, and the clay tennis court his father built, complete with lighting and wire fence. “Though at time I felt isolated,” he says. “I had an imaginative life.”

In Goldsboro he had a chance to sample another facet of life. “There was  a used furniture store where they sold all sorts of things,” he says, and shows me a bull-fighting poster from the 1920s. “I got that there. It was owned by Wylie and Wanda and it was my introduction to culture.”

Early Cultural Influences

Even before he started at Goldsboro High School, Richard had a fascination for art. The walls of his parents’ house were covered with watercolors done by Richard’s great-uncle, Billy Moore. A chemistry professor at Columbia University, Billy also made watercolors of town scenes, houses peeking through gardens, backyards, narrow streets. He did the paintings as documents and sent them to family members. Billy’s daughter was a prima ballerina with the Metropolitan Ballet. “Billy Moore was a big inspiration on ideas of arts” says Richard. 

Three other men, besides his father, also influenced Richard during his adolescence. One was his scoutmaster, a Swede by birth and a knowledgeable outdoorsman. “He was a character-builder,” Richard tells me. “He prompted me to Eagle rank and taught me leadership.”

When Richard entered Goldsboro High School, his art teacher, Robert Glenn Smith, saw his student’s promise as an artist. He nominated Richard for the Governor’s School. “The idea that I had talent truly spearheaded my future as an artist,” says Richard. “And my mother was always a believer that my future was in art.”

The other man who influenced the young Richard Bland was his high school chorale instructor, George Trautwein. For years, George was chorale master at the Lost Colony. Andy Griffith, who also worked summers at the Lost Colony in those years, told George about Goldsboro High School. Andy Griffith had been the theater director at Goldsboro High in the 1950s.

“George Trautwein was the source of my passion and my spirit and my expressiveness to pursue a disciplined art,” Richard says. “He was a wonderful teacher. He got your attention in class, would throw chairs to the packed audience of students It was electrifying.”

When Richard leaves the porch for the kitchen, I pick up a round, pitted scrap of rusted iron, the size of a grapefruit. It serves as an ashtray in peace-time, but during the Civil War it was part of a cannon ball that might have blow someone’s legs off. Richard came across it when he was on a scouting trip with his old scoutmaster. 

Avoiding the Draft

Richard returns with a cup of coffee, and sips at it as he takes a seat. By the time he graduated high school the Vietnam War was raging. It was at about the time of the Tet offensive and the Army was throwing young men at the Viet Cong like slabs of meat. Richard’s father, a heavily decorated World War Ii vet, encouraged all of his sons to evade the draft. “My father did not believe Vietnam was adequate enough for us to participate in the war,” Richard recalls. College was one way to avoid the draft.

Richard’s twin brothers attended East Carolina University in nearby Greenville and on weekends Richard would drive the 40 miles and hang out with them. They attended concerts and went to a local coffeehouse. Richard saw Segovia, the Beach Boys, Buffalo Springfield and the Lettermen. Just after Martin Luther King’s assassination, Richard, with his twin brothers, attended a memorial service at an all-Black church in Greenville. “My brothers gave me a new window on culture,” he says. “That time made a huge impression on me.”

Both his parents urged Richard to attend an art college. He applied to RPI, and although his high school grades were anything but stellar, his portfolio made up for this deficiency. He was accepted. His parents loaded up the station wagon with a trunk and suitcases and deposited their son at Scherer Hall. He had three roommates, and almost immediately got involved in campus politics.

One of Richard’s three roommates, Mike Fowler, became president of the Student Government Association. One of his other roommates became vice president. And Richard served as a representative and later as a senator in the student government.

This was 1968 and change was in the air. “Student’s at RPI were pushing the edges, testing the established ideas of the time,” says Richard. “People were growing their hair out. People came to school without wearing a tie or a white shirt.”

RPI was changing rapidly at that time, just three years before it became Virginia Commonwealth University. The instructors were no longer regional artists. They came from California, Minnesota, New York, and their ideas about art were unconventional and some of them had a complete disregard for technique.

No Foundation In Art Foundation

“There was a New York designer who taught there,” says Richard. “And everything in his house was white. The couch was white, the rug was white, the walls were white, the lamps were white. Like Erik Sate, who only ate white food.”

The projects in art foundation were not challenging. “They’d give you a cub scout project and you had to do it just the way they wanted,” he says.

In the meantime, Richard was getting to know the city. He hung out at the old Village Restaurant and helped organize the Free University at Broad and Linden. A bunch of the older beatniks taught there - Lester Blackiston, Rik Davis, Bill Kendrick .

In the year following his freshman year, Richard rented a room over Chelf’s Drug Store at the corner of Shafer and Grace. A lot of interesting characters lived over top Chelf’s, people like Rodney Miller, a cab driver and Edgar Cayce devotee, who did drawings with crayons. “They were actually very nice,” says Richard.

Next to Chelf’s, on the alleyway, was an old carriage house where Eric Kennedy, a representational street scene painter, lived. He was a few years older than Richard. Eric had art shows in his own space, and the space itself appealed to Richard. When Eric left, Richard moved in at $30 a month. It had electricity and a sink and across the courtyard was a basement that had a toilet,” he says. “There was a peach tree in the courtyard.”

At his back was the constant threat of the draft. “It was a frightening time,” says Richard. “You were either in school or at the draft board.” Academically, Richard wasn’t doing that well. He had flunked out of college and went to a community college in North Carolina so that he could re-enter RPI. “I scraped my way back into school strictly to avoid the military, because I am simply not cut out for the military,” he says and then considers what he has said. “If I were in the military and somebody like me came to them I would put him up against the wall and have a firing squad take care of that guy. My mind was not disciplined in the way the military would require.”

Collecting KUL-CHUR

Richard successfully avoided the draft. A year after he moved into the carriage house he found a massive studio at 1016 West Franklin. It was a basement about 3,000 square feet, with the ceiling covered in a cross-hatching of radiator and water pipes. He started constructing large frames covered in fabric and illuminated from within. His class came to his studio for a critique. “It was revolutionary bringing the class into my space, but the instructor was very impressed,” says Richard. “Somebody once called me a rebel and I said, ‘No, I’m a revolutionary.’“

With his new space, Richard began collecting what he calls “cultural artifacts”. When an old drug store was being torn down, Richard would salvage parts of the soda fountain and the chrome swivel stools. He found old bottles under houses that were being razed. “I soon began to fill up my space with cultural objects, cultural artifacts,” he says.

And all through this period he was meeting people. He and his girlfriend at the time, a young artist named Barbara, visited the studio/home of William Fletcher Jones, a carriage house on Foushee. “I didn’t identify with his style of art,” says Richard. “But I was intrigued by his lifestyle. There was a barber chair in his home and gallery and this is back in sixty-nine or 70, and you know I have a barber chair in my house now. He had an eclectic collection of things around him and I liked that.”

In 1971, six months before he was to graduate from Virginia Commonwealth university, the first draft lottery was held and Richard got a high number so he quit school to pursue art. “I just walked away in my senior year,” he says. “I wasn’t there for a degree. I had come to art school to learn technique in painting in oils and at the end of my experience in my senior year I didn’t know the difference between a water color brush and an oil painting brush. I had no understanding of mixed media.”

Art School Without Technique

Much of what he learned at VCU was bunk. “After my first painting class at VCU, I realized I wasn’t going to learn much about painting,” he says. “It wasn’t about painting and applying techniques. It was all academic and theory. If you were going to be an artist  you had to go toward the avant-garde. They didn’t show us anything about technique.”

After quitting school, Richard got a job as a family portrait photographer. He traveled throughout the South with other employees taking the photographs. The money was fairly good and within three months he had enough to move to New York.

Richard’s grandmother had attended Columbia University. When he arrived in New York he applied for a job there. He worked as a mail clerk in the registrar’s office and took two classes: one in sculpture, the other in painting. His sculpture professor was immediately taken by his work and Richard became his assistant. He was also given a studio and a small stipend.

While in New York, Richard visited galleries and museums, learning more about art. He visited the Whitney and the Metropolitan. “I saw great paintings representing our past culture,” he says. “At VCU, at eighteen, I had been told that painting was dead.”

He remembers being stricken by Rodin’s “The Thinker”, which stood in front of Philosophy Hall at  Columbia. Everyday he would see this massive bronze on his way to work. It captivated him. He was moved to the verge of tears by it. And then he would visit some of the galleries in SoHo that displayed avant-garde that may have been cutting edge work a decade before, but now lacked the sharpness of a butter knife.

He stayed in New York for a couple of years, then returned to Richmond. “I just decided that I had more potential in Richmond,” he says.

He stayed with friends and down at his parents beach house at Topsail. He went up to Connecticut for a time. He had made the decision to learn to paint. “I was going to learn to paint myself,” he says. “I bought brushes, paints, canvases, and I started to learn.”

Learning to Paint

Richard devoured biographies about painters. He shared a vision with the Barbizon School artists, their fluid, artful techniques, the landscapes of Corot. He loved Goya and the English landscape painters. “Painterly, representational art,” says Richard. “Warmer, natural colors. The power of nature. That’s what I embraced.”

When he got back to Richmond, he found another $10 a month basement that included a small carriage house. It was on Plum Street. And once situated, Richard began to paint in earnest.

“Every penny I had went to art supplies,” he says. “I lost thirty pounds that summer.” But, he made 45 paintings and Richard painted on the spot, whatever grabbed his eye. “”Being a witness as life unfolded in front of me,” he says. “Day, night, winter, summer. I was painting. I began a twelve-year period that I did not have a job. All I did was paint.”

And there were parties in that basement and carriage house, legendary parties with one hundred or more people from all walks of life “That’s a very significant part of the life of an artist, connecting with people. That was a crucible for creativity.”

Richard Bland was finally beginning to learn to paint. “I documented a time and a place,” he says. “People would see me in a dark alley or in a snowstorm doing a painting. People have these memories of seeing me.”

Rut Goodwin and Eliot Clark

Somewhere in 1978 Richard met two people who would change his life: Rutherford Goodwin, and Eliot Clark. Of Rut, he says, “He was the most important person who recognized me as a painter.”

Rutherford Goodwin was a retired art instructor who had taught at the Ringling Art School in Sarasota, Florida. He had grown up in Bruton Parish in Williamsburg and actually watched the reclamation of that colonial town. He took technique very seriously. He taught Richard how to prepare a stretched canvas with rabbit skin glue. “He would come to my studio for the next five years with a bottle of sherry and we’d talk ‘til morning light,” Richard recalls. “He was a very patient man and helped me lay the foundation in technique.”

And Rut Goodwin did something more. He introduced Richard to Eliot Clark, the last living American impressionist. Eliot Clark was a landscapist born in 1881, whose father, Walter Clark, was an artist who established a number of galleries in New York City and was good friends with Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent, among others. 

Richard drove out to Eliot Clark’s house outside of Charlottesville and met with the master. Eliot was 97 at the time. The visit lasted three hours and Eliot critiqued 12 paintings of Richard’s in three hours. “Eliot Clark noted that my art was unique, which was really something to be hearing from this man,” says Richard. “He talked about the patterns in my paintings. He gave me tremendous pointers that became useful as I matured as an artist. There was a spiritual and intellectual interchange. He gave me so much during those three hours. There was trust and belief between us.”

As he showed Richard out the door, the sun was setting through the fall leaves on the trees and the image will stay with Richard forever. “From corner to corner, autumnal leaves, various rich hues,” he says. They corresponded briefly and then, four months later, Eliot Clark died.

Shortly after Eliot’s death, his estate was broken up and Bob Mayo, of Gallery Mayo, ended up with the first painting Eliot Clark ever exhibited, a barnyard scene of three piglets and a chicken. It was priced at a mere $650, but Richard, at the time, couldn’t scrape up a fraction of that money. The painting was sold to a man in Maryland and ten years later, the painting turned up again at Gallery Mayo and Richard purchased it. “I now own the first painting that Eliot Clark ever exhibited,” Richard tells me. “It was like it was destined to be mine.”

Death Kiss To Warhol

During the same year he met Eliot Clark, Richard attended a gathering at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The new wing had just been completed and Andy Warhol was there. The balconies had been cordoned off. The culturati of Richmond gathered for the event bunched together behind the red velvet ropes, waiting for a glimpse of the great icon of Pop Art.

Richard, dressed in a white dinner jacket and a trademark vest, stood on the mezzanine with Leslie Mulligan, a statuesque woman, over six-feet tall, whose head was completely shaven. She, too, wore a white dinner jacket. Richard looked down and saw Andy Warhol enter the landing with two museum curators at his side. On an impulse, he climbed under the ropes, walked jauntily down the stairs, approached Andy Warhol, extended his hand, handed him a  pen and said, “I want you to autograph my hand.” Andy Warhol complied. As the artist signed Richard’s hand, Richard leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. Later, he Xeroxed his own autographed hand and photographed it. “I called that the kiss of death,” says Richard. “What Warhol had done had run its full cycle, so it was a kiss of death. It was the youthful audacity, which I try and keep going throughout my life. That childlike quality of seeing things for the first time.”

Around the same time as his encounter with Andy Warhol, Richard met Marsha, a VCU student who rented an apartment across the street from his carriage house. They moved in together and eventually married. Richard was painting up a storm. He would got to the banks of the James River and paint, sometimes climbing down the iron ladder off the Boulevard Bridge to lose himself in the giant sycamores down there. He carried his canvases and brushes and paints. “Life precedes art,” he says. “You live life first and then you carry it into the art.”

Down And Out On Oregon Hill

And Marsha always encouraged him, critiquing each new painting, even before it had dried. They moved into Marsha’s place for a short time and then rented a very cheap space down on Oregon Hill, the last house on Cherry Street, facing Hollywood Cemetery. It was an old tavern and Marsh and Richard lived in the stone-lined English basement. There was no toilet, but there was electricity. In lieu of a toilet, they used an ice cream parlor chair with a missing seat. They lined it with a Glad garbage bag and placed a conventional toilet seat on the place where the seat would have been. Every day Richard would take the bag of waste and deposit it in a dumpster near VCU.

They continue living in the basement for the next couple months. Neither of them was very good at making money. “We didn’t have economic minds,” says Richard. As temperatures climbed, it soon became apparent that they would have to move.

“It was starting to warm up and the bugs started coming out of the walls,” he remembers. “That’s what happens when you live in a basement, so we had to move.” They rented a house on Plum Street, leasing out two bedrooms so they could afford the rent. In this new house, they also lived in the basement. But here there was heat and plumbing and there were no bugs. “My whole life has revolved around Plum Street,” says Richard, who notes that his old carriage house, Marsha’s space, and the house they rented together are less than a block away from the carriage house he has called home for many years now.

Two Acts Of God

In the fall of 1982, Richard Bland organized the Grove Avenue Gallery. For several months it operated out of a small carriage house behind the house at the corner of Grove and Lombardy. “It was a revolutionary concept for Richmond,” he says. “Two major exhibits every week. It brought people together, all forms of people, generated shows from all walks of life. From VCU professors to reclusive artists like Ricky Rhoads, from blue-haired ladies, who were Sunday painters, to professors from University of Richmond.”

The gallery later moved to Carriage House Books on Harrison, thanks to the generosity of the bookstore owner. And then in September, a funny thing happened. Marsha and Richard were driving back to Richmond from his parent’s beach house. Outside of Emporia, Richard pulled the old yellow station wagon over to the shoulder to check the radiator. As he unscrewed the cap, steam erupted, scalding his arms, and the engine caught fire. Their insurance claim gave them $1,200, so they moved to New York. Richard had found a basement apartment on Staten Island. They took up residence there, and Richard painted New York.

About a year later, tired of the city’s pace, the couple moved to Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina. They had an inexpensive apartment and Richard set up a gallery in part of the space and would hold art openings on the weekends. He was prolific as ever, but never really sold many of his paintings.

In less than twelve months, a hurricane approached Wrightsville Beach, where it was expected to make landfall. Richard and Marsha, and everyone else there, for that matter, were evacuated. They secured the apartment, packed their possessions and left Wrightsville for good, a hurricane ushering them along. “We pulled out in an urgent situation, got off the island and just kept driving back to Richmond,” says Richard. “It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. That great big hurricane coming up.”

It was also the end of their marriage. Marsha decided she wanted out, so she took some 30 paintings and left Richard’s life.

The Carriage House

Richard returned to Richmond and moved in with Eddie Peters, an old and dear friend, and something of a mentor. They shared the shell of a house on West Cary Street, just east of Meadow. It was a low point in Richard’s life. He began examining his life, changing some of his habits, and bit by bit started pulling it back together.

His parents called him and proposed that they sell a piece of land that belonged to Richard, so that he could buy a place of his own. “It was a windfall,” he says. “That’s when I bought this place.”

The place, about four years before Richard purchased it, had caved in after a particularly heavy snowfall, and a friend of Richard’s purchased it. This friend, Maurice, began rebuilding it, essentially reconstructing one entire wall and most of the second floor, laying brick on brick and Richard was there to help. “So I helped rebuild the building that became my building,” he says. “It was originally built in eighteen-ninety as a carriage repository. It was also contracted out to a milk dairy at one point, probably Richmond Dairy.”

Moving into the new space changed Richard. It was as if his life began again and the young people floating into Richmond at that time were a new breed, and Richard was there to capture it in the beginning. “In nineteen eight-six I saw a new surge of optimism, something like the sixties generation, something like the punk explosion and I recognized an opportunity to document it,” he says. He painted many portraits and live bands during that period.

Being Taught By Nature

As we sit and talk in the quiet of his carriage house, where only a ceiling fan intrudes, Richard tells me a bit about his real teachers. “My real instructor was Nature,” he says. The seasons. The unexpected wind blows through. The rains come. You anticipate these things. You become synchronized with Nature. Nature re-forms you. And the same is true for restless youth, which is why I did so many of the portraits of the young people.”

He talks about the hundreds, maybe a thousand, paintings he has done of Richmond. “I have painted many of the corners around Richmond,” he says. “These are paintings that could be displayed in Paris or Germany. But I’ve never been part of the art status quo in this city. I am not going to subjugate myself because it would alter the spirit of my work and the observation of the city. I paint with that childlike vision and I will keep it alive even though it is very tough in this world to do that.”

As I walk through his house, from space to space, this home, this museum, this gallery, catching glimpses of the hundreds of paintings he has made over the years, it strikes me that Richard’s abode, is in and of itself a painting. It is deeply textured and richly colored and just keeps growing, a work-in-progress.

Standing at the front door, in the heat of the mid-July sun, Richard tells me a final story, and there are so many more to tell. He tells me how he felt the urge one day to paint a house down on Oregon Hill. A freezing rain had been falling since dawn. He walked with easel, paint, brushes, canvas and umbrella, down to the house and set  up his tools, holding the umbrella over him and the canvas as he painted. He painted furiously, and noted how the freezing rain was coating the twigs and branches of the trees. He painted until the canvas was full, his fingers raw, numb and blue, but the work was finally done. And then he noticed that a full one-inch thickness of ice had formed on the umbrella and that the thin fabric was straining under the weight. At each point of the umbrella there were four-inch long icicles, and when he moved they snapped clean and hit the ice-paved ground with a clink and a clatter.