The Interior Journey

Maryhill Museum of Art presents 40 paintings by renowned American realist Richard F. Lack.

- John O'Hern

Richard Lack (1928-2009) remembered studying with R. H. Ives Gammell (1893-1981) at the Fenway Studios in Boston: “He was very direct, very frank. No hyperbole; just right to the point—which I appreciated, although I got a little irritated in the beginning because as a precocious art student you don’t like to have people tell you that your work is awful.”

Lack went on to become a distinguished teacher and, in 1999, the American Society of Portrait Artists presented him with their first Founder’s Award. This award is “given to artists who have elevated and continued the tradition of fine portraiture, through works of exceptional merit and the consistent, thorough training of younger artists. Throughout his long and distinguished career, Lack’s work has exhibited the highest standard of both artistry and craftsmanship.”

Lack studied with Gammell in the early ’50s when Gammell was finishing his pictorial sequence based on Francis Thompson’s poem The Hound of Heaven, which he had begun over a decade earlier. The poem inspired “pictorial ideas for which I remained unable to find imagery susceptible of conveying my meaning,” he wrote. A breakthrough came from his reading the writings of Carl Jung. “For an artist interested in the imaginative appeal of his thesis more than in its lasting scientific, validity, Jung demonstrates convincingly the close relationship between myths, symbols, and poetic imagery, and the perpetually recurring emotional patterns of human life from which they evolved…”

I saw his Hound of Heaven sequence at a museum in Worthing, West Sussex, many years ago. I frequently vacationed in nearby Storrington where Thompson (1859-1907) wrote his immortal poem.