

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.

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To mark their 150th anniversary, Bream was commissioned by the Savile Club in London’s Mayfair to paint a series of interiors of the club and portrait studies of members.Portrait of a Minister, 1956. His landscapes have focussed on the north Kent coast and several painting trips to Spain, most recently Segovia and Galicia. More recently he has concentrated on a group of large-scale interiors and still lifes. In 2013 he exhibited paintings of the Holy Land and Petra at the Daggett Gallery, Kensington, and subsequently spent a month painting on the island of North Haven, Maine. He has received major commissions from industry and commerce for large figure paintings, including the much admired Bar picture at Green’s Restaurant in St James’s.īream has worked extensively as a painter of portraits, interiors, and landscapes, and has travelled widely, painting en plein air in Australia, India, North Africa, Egypt, Yemen, Turkey, Kenya, the USA and Europe. Antony Bream held his first major exhibition at the Fine Art Society in 1979, and subsequently has had one-man shows at numerous West End galleries including Derek Johns, St James’s Art Group, Messum’s and Rafael Valls.
