Professional Title: Contemporary Painter
Areas Richard is able to mentor in: Finding gallery representation; developing professional practices, helping to focus and clarify who you are as an artist.
Professional Bio I was born in Lima, Peru to American parents, and after living in Seattle, Dallas, and Madrid, Spain, my family moved to Geneva, Switzerland when I was eleven years old. One year later, an epiphany on my first day in seventh grade art class was all I needed to accept that being a ‘modern artist’ was to be my destiny. While I no longer call myself a ‘modern artist’, I am today an exhibiting Los Angeles based contemporary painter, teacher, lecturer, and mentor. After high school, I was accepted into the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and completed two years there, but the war in Viet-Nam was raging, and I found myself drafted by the US Army. To keep from going to Viet-Nam, I joined the US Navy, where I was trained as a photographer. I spent the next four years in Pensacola, Fla, and Keflavik, Iceland, doing general purpose and aerial photography. In 1971, I completed my enlistment, and wanting to go back to Art school, I applied to, and was accepted as a third year student at a brand new, completely unknown art school, Cal Arts. I graduated in 1973 with a BFA in studio art. To support myself, I started working in record stores (music was a passion) and in 1982, opened my own store in Reseda, CA – a combination record store, art gallery, and performance place called BEBOP RECORDS & FINE ART. It hosted gallery shows by contemporary artists (Raymond Pettibon did one of his first gallery shows there), musicians (Lucinda Williams, the Minutemen, Los Lobos, Beck, etc.) and spoken word / performance artists like Henry Rollins, Jim Carroll, Tequila Mockingbird and Vaginal Davis. Bebop became one of the best known alternative venues in Los Angeles. I closed Bebop in 1990, mainly because I wanted to concentrate on my primary passion – painting. I started developing the body of work that still engages me today. I have been exhibiting regularly since the mid 1990’s, and have been represented by galleries in Seattle, New York, Oregon, Kentucky, and Arizona. I’ve been with a number of L.A. galleries over the years, the most recent being Lora Schlesinger Gallery at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica. They represented me for the last 12 years, and just closed (Lora retired) in January. To support myself over the years, I’ve taken any number of part-time art-related jobs – installation at LACMA, designing record covers and graphics for small punk labels, working for Art shipping companies, etc. For five years, I was the assistant to the director of the Laband Art Gallery at Loyola Marymount University.
For the last six years I’ve been teaching part time at The Whizin Center for Continuing Education at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles. My main class is Acrylic Painting, and I also do several regular lecture programs - one on Contemporary Art, and another on Professional Practices for Emerging Artists. For many years I have lectured and been on panel discussions dealing specifically with finding gallery representation, professional practices, and the nature of Contemporary Art – what it is, and what it isn’t. I’ve spoken, lectured, or been on panels at CalArts, UCLA, Loyola Marymount, Azusa Pacific University, CSU Fresno, CSU Long Beach, CSU Channel Islands, as well as numerous art groups and associations. The last five or six years I’ve been active in mentoring and helping artists trying to find their way into the gallery system/art world. I meet with anyone who asks.
Best CalArts Memory: Best is meeting my wife for the last 44 years, Dori Atlantis - a founding member of Judy Chicago's Feminist Art Program. Also unforgettable was my original room-mate in the dorms - a blossoming young actor named David Hasselhoff.
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