Through A Glass Clearly: Reflections and Distortions

by Charles McGuigan 06.2021

John Crutchfield, owner of Artemis Gallery, recently purchased a number of new Richard Lee Bland pieces for his gallery’s permanent collection. It’s a totally different direction for Richard who has been an integral part of the Richmond art scene since the 1970s and is known for his representational oil on canvas paintings. “The thing I find unusual is the way the reflected light off these 1800 window panes creates an abstract image as if it were painted by a modernist,” John said.

A week later I visit with Richard in his Fan carriage (ice) house tucked between Plum and Lombardy. For a while now, Richard has been looking for a new direction in his art. 

“As a result of the recent history of our nation, I’ve been trying to transfer things into a different kind of art expression,” he tells me. “And this last year I’ve been using the camera for documentation of a lot of political situations. I’ve been moving toward photographing topics around my neighborhood.”

And then something almost accidental occurred. “About a month and a half ago I noticed in a window along West Avenue in the Fan District a wavy glass window pane up in someone’s row house and I was on the corner and I had a good view,” Richard tells me. “I was about fifteen feet away and I took a snapshot of it with my digital camera. I took it home and was able to crop around the window, and I had what one would have to call an image that was more like an abstract painting than anything else.”

That first image resonated with Richard’s aesthetic sense. “The reflections in the wavy glass from across the street reinterpreted, in a non-objective way, become a reality,” he says. “And to me it’s sort of representative of the reality that we’re living today, where there’s a lot of mixed communications, a lot of distortions in our understanding between people groups and community groups.”

Richard is both an artist and a student of art history. He is reminded of another tumultuous time, and how artists of that era reacted.  “After World War II we moved away from representational art for a time,” he explains. “Artists felt as though they couldn’t express our culture and a world torn apart with representational imagery. They felt they had to show the emotion, the turmoil, and they could do that through slashes of paint and squiggles and explosions and outbursts of emotion in a paint style called abstract expressionism. And I’ve transferred that into my photography in the current time we’re living in.”

The results of his new-found art are stunning. He points to one of them on his laptop screen. “That’s a reflection of a garden in wavy glass, in cylinder glass,” Richard says. “The pathway begins to look like a stream bed; you feel like you’re by a creek. You interpret it through mood and feeling and emotion, and that suspends the reality part. Just the other day I was saying, reality will not tell you the truth. Now we’re having to read through distortions to find the truth.”

He considers the function of his art, and of all art. “It just brings some comfort and some healing,” he says. “Art settles us, levels us out, helps us to have more faith, have more marvel. You know, like a child would have—the wonderment of a child.” 

Then, Richard invites me to consider another piece scooped by his lens from a reflection in an ancient pane of glass in a Fan row home. “It looks like you’re walking in the water on the James River, over the rocks, and the puddling water’s all round you,” he suggests.

You can almost hear the sound of rushing water.

“That’s what I’m doing,” says Richard Lee Bland.