Richard Sheehan by Jeremy Stone

In 1978 a quick errand took me from the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston to the Alpha Gallery on Newbury Street. I was to deliver a congratulatory message to Richard Sheehan at his exhibition opening. Having never met him or seen his work, it did not occur to me on that humid day that this might be anything but a brisk walk, a stop on the way home. But once I walked up the steps and entered the crowded gallery, wading through the voices and conversations to the walls beyond, the importance of the errand became clear. Staying on the perimeter of the gallery in a clockwise circle, I got as close as I could. The paintings, each one a full stop, were alluring in their honesty in describing a fleeting ordinary scene. The presence of the viewer is unspoken and temporary. I thought of John Sloan, Fairfield Porter, and the intimacy of the artist’s mind and thoughts; how the acts of looking and seeing are two very different endeavors – what we see and feel is unique to our individual histories and the ability to be in the present moment. To absorb the moment that we are witnessing, Sheehan is in the transportation business – transporting the viewer to the location where the artist is standing. You are there with him.

My intrigue with Sheehan’s paintings deepened over the ensuing decades. There was nothing about Sheehan’s childhood in Dorchester, Massachusetts, attending Boston Latin, or having a rock band in high school that would suggest that a painter with an exquisite eye like his would emerge. Where Donny Wahlberg and the New Kids on the Block also grew up, the arts were not embedded in the neighborhood. However, sometimes one’s earliest experiences and teachers stay with you the longest.

A former Yale classmate Howie Lee Weiss, a longtime close friend, artistic confidante and artist, forgot nothing: “At Massachusetts College of Art, Richard studied with and emulated the painter George Nick in his undergraduate studies. In many ways this formed a solid early core and those early lessons remained with him always. In those early classes Richard was taught how to ‘heighten color and boost up light,’ a concept that he continued to be fascinated with and that he embedded in each painting. These early classes under the mentorship of Nick stayed with him as he went on to Yale Graduate School of Art and Architecture for an MFA, where he received the Elizabeth Canfield Hicks Memorial Scholarship. While at Yale, Richard studied with William Bailey, Bernard Chaet, Lester Johnson, and John Walker, and also, but less so, with Al Held.

“Bailey taught the figure painting class at Yale and Richard struggled at first, as the class started from the premise of painting with three muted colors only. This was a shock at first to Richard’s high-key, jazzed-up palette – but with time he figured out the system. Gradually and slowly Bailey added additional colors to the mix. Stripping painting ideas down to basics, then building back up, was in many ways like learning to speak all over again.

“Bernard Chaet looked out for Richard as his advisor and they shared their love of the Boston area. I specifically remember Richard having a critique one day about his still life paintings of objects placed on the floor, the viewpoint being bird’s eye downward. Chaet suggested he ‘look up and out.’ I remember discussing this simple suggestion with Richard and how it allowed him to venture more into landscape – looking up and out.

“One day Sheehan and Howie Lee Weiss visited John Walker’s studio in New Haven – a cavernous studio with 10 giant abstractions in progress, each with their own set of paints. That day in 1975, witnessing Walker’s studio became etched in their minds. They spoke of it forever after. Years later Weiss remembered Richard talking about wanting to imbue Walker’s kind of physical presence into his realistic landscapes. Richard saw the big Walker abstractions as a challenge, while also something to emulate and incorporate into his scenes.

“Richard’s approach was always direct and formal: Color, light, form, drawing, composition, space and all the things you might expect. When critiquing students he wasn’t overly focused on social, political, cultural or personal content, but preferred to address students’ paintings for their formal qualities, giving students little tips and insider’s tricks he himself learned about color mixing, drawing, values and more - trying to help each student make each picture better on its own terms utilizing basic, demonstrative and practical advice.

“At upper level critiques Richard was one to hold his stance, and argue his passionate point if necessary. Intense, heated and loud discussions, disagreements in the thick of battle, have been reported, but with everyone being friends again later in the evening or at least by the next day.

“An early influence was the big John Singer Sargent painting, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, 1882, at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; he was impressed always by Sargent’s swift hand and confidence. Wayne Thiebaud was an artist whom Richard respected and could never get enough of. Edgar Degas, Edward Hopper, Richard Diebenkorn, George Nick, and John Walker were all important chapters of Richard’s visual vocabulary. Sheehan loved the quality Ralph Goings achieved in his paintings. Richard shared how American he thought Goings was. Giants like Matisse and Picasso were quite important to him.” He and Weiss would go back and forth over which one was better or more important. It was a conversation they never tired of.

“Sheehan and Weiss talked endlessly about Warhol and Lichtenstein, discussing their pop ideas, clarity of image, their intent and their fame. Coke bottles, Brillo Boxes, Jackie O, Elvis, Mickey, and all the Comic Book Paintings.... Well, this was America. Warhol and Lichtenstein did it, and this fascinated them– this touched Richard.”

Another Yale classmate, Elizabeth Peak, who taught with Sheehan in the Yale Summer Art program after their first year of graduate school, wrote: “In passing one day Richard said that he tried not to talk about how quickly he painted because he didn’t want anyone getting the wrong idea about his work. More importantly Richard wanted his speed to be understood for what it had become: his ability to capture a unique moment in time, in fluid brush strokes almost without regard to the size of the canvas. His paintings look as if they appear by magic as if with no effort or plan.

“However, it was Richard’s particular ability to ‘see’ or imagine a painting from looking around him, systematically prepare a canvas for it, a particular size and shape. Then when he returns to the location ready to paint he has his attack in his mind. Working from the actual location helps him structure the painting although when you or I look at the location and compare it to the work, we may not have originally seen what he saw.

“With the variables of scale, composition, color, time of day he would relate them to each other in one integrated statement in paint. He rarely added anything extraneous, no random people walking through the scene or a fallen bicycle, etc., unless it worked within the whole. His goal was a visual statement not a literal one. Not a story about the light on a certain bridge at a time of day when people got off work or something, but the way the light defined the moment and using the bridge or roadway, as a vehicle for that particular moment. We never discussed how his religious beliefs may have informed his work but if there is a God, it’s expressed in these moments.

“He often told the story of someone walking up to him as he painted wondering why there were no people in the painting and how he’d try to explain the painting didn’t need them. Richard mainly painted in the environs of his home turf of Dorchester, Massachusetts and later, Cumberland, Rhode Island. The interloper would walk away marveling and yet still wondering. Later, Richard took on the challenge of painting subjects that were so commonplace that no one could ask what he was painting even if they may wonder why.” — Elizabeth J. Peak, 2018

Sheehan worked outdoors, with an old mail truck carrying his easel and canvases, which he set up on highways in the Rhode Island and Massachusetts suburbs. He was inspired by the structural elements of bridges, overpasses and the horizons surrounding and beyond the freeway. The weather and time of year dictated the palette and colors in his work.

His earliest paintings were of buildings, houses, backyards – local scenes depicting life around the Boston area. But eventually these local scenes gave way to less personal, large, iconic images of highway bridges and underpasses, singular images that spoke of an American landscape. Richard changed from a painter of common daily places – to a painter of “American Monuments.”

In these highway paintings one can see all the influences of Sheehan’s painting heroes. Before and during his first West Coast show in November 1982, Sheehan attracted immediate attention from artists and collectors alike – the show sold out. Soon he was exhibiting in Chicago, New York and Houston. Artists Richard McLean and Wayne Thiebaud saw the exhibition and admired Sheehan’s paintings – how he handled paint, composition and color.

McLean bought a small painting because “he wanted to take it home and study it.” Thiebaud, in his classic stance – arms folded against his chest, feet apart – announced that Sheehan was “an artist’s artist.” With the heat emanating from the large summer paintings, the feeling of a sunburn standing in front of the hot yellows, saturated oranges and burning sand of the roadways was psychological if not physical.

As Sheehan’s paintings got larger and more abstract, West Coast art critics assumed he was a West Coast artist, a student of Elmer Bischoff or Richard Diebenkorn due to his palette and the light emanating from his paintings.

“You can hang him between a de Kooning and a Thiebaud, and he holds up – Sheehan can hold the wall. He is not going anywhere. You know, you can’t do that with very many artists,” Allan Stone said. It was a pronouncement. Stated as a matter of fact, not as a biased opinion. He had done this exact installation on a second-floor hallway landing of his home, outside his bedroom.

Ten years later I saw a big horizontal Sheehan landscape hanging over a fireplace in Allan’s house in Maine next to a Richard Estes painting. Allan Stone owned 37 paintings by Richard Sheehan. That he saw Sheehan’s work in the modest 800-square-foot shoebox space of my first San Francisco gallery brought me inordinate pleasure. Two subsequent solo shows at Allan Stone Gallery in 1984 and 1986 marked Sheehan’s first one man exhibitions in New York City, an enormous rite of passage for any artist.

Mark Johnson, who was teaching freshman foundation at SFAI, was a regular at my gallery and would bring his students to see the exhibitions, as would Barbara Rogers, Inez Storer and Carlos Villa. After numerous classes of SFAI students came to 126 Post Street to see Richard Sheehan’s shows in 1982 and 1984, and to the 23 Grant Avenue space in 1987, a visiting lecture at SFAI was scheduled for Richard’s next trip to San Francisco. At 800 Chestnut Street the students and faculty packed the room – you could not breathe. It was a windowless seminar room on the north side of the lower level, on the right of the big ramp, across from the ceramics studio. Richard was as expressive and dynamic as his paintings, with a heavy Boston accent!

Richard’s bottom line message to students was, after acquiring drawing skills, to let those skills become a part of your skin so you can forget about them and go on. He wasn’t recommending drawing from life and staying in representation – you needed the tools to begin with. The subject as a realistic image was not as important as the process or experience of making the painting.

The works from 1991–2006 pushed Sheehan away from the representational into the conceptual. He deliberately moved himself out of his comfort zone. Richard wanted to pay homage to Franz Kline, JFK, the Beatles, and the devastating importance of the Vietnam War within his paintings. “How?” was the question. Using the McDonald’s billboards and roadside signs was the idea he had begun to experiment with.

He stepped back from his galleries (which was easy to do as two had closed during the Persian Gulf War and ensuing recession) and the art market to shift his subject matter without pressure or judgement. This also allowed Sheehan the opportunity and time to work inside a studio at home, instead of by an icy freeway in the winter snow or in the heat and humidity of a Rhode Island summer.

The billboards inside the small 1982 landscape paintings, Van’s Auto Body and Billboard on Freeport Street, were always there. In the larger, later paintings of the 1990s they grew in importance as they became beacons, icons of American history and culture.

Jeremy Stone, Cullman Stone LLC

November 24, 2018