DURING MY FIRST YEAR living in Minneapolis, I met Richard and Katherine [Lack] at the Jung Association summer party held at their house in Minnetonka in August 1982. Talking to the host, I asked [about] his work. He replied simply, “Artist.” I recall thinking, “Oh, great, another flakey ‘artist’ from the New York School.” (Jackson Pollock, etc.) If my reaction was jaundiced, there was a good reason. In college when I received a D- on an art history paper I had written on Vermeer I found in the Frick because the professor had disliked the representation tradition. I met with the head of the department and requested that she read the paper to determine whether, in fact, it had merited the grade. Within a week, the paper returned to me, the D- having been changed to an A-. Now, in 1982, here I was in the art scene again, but this time, I was in for a surprise when Lack said that his style was “representational”. I asked Lack if I could see his studio.

It was one of the few numinous experiences of my life to take that step into his studio, a studio that surely could have been the atelier of an Old Master or Monet–lofty ceiling, skylights to provide constant Northern lighting, the pungent smells of oil pigments, linseed oil, and turpentine, and the breathtaking visual display of paintings, finished and unfinished. These works all showed the subtle play of natural light on human faces and forms and the brilliance of natural colors found in the landscapes painted en plein air as Monet had done at different times of day–morning, afternoon, at dusk, and evening. “Here,” I told myself, “is a true artist,” surely one of only a handful in the world, one that through synchronicity I had found in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I had entered a magical world that I thought had long ago vanished, and I knew then that I never wanted to leave that world.

I last saw Richard in February 2009 and although he never again took paint brush to canvas, Katherine sent me The Fisherman “unfinished” and unvarnished (above). At my request, Allan Banks, (who studied with Lack) varnished the canvas as a final tribute to the artist. In September of that year, Richard took the voyage we all must take, The Fisherman being his final painting.

–Barbara Long, M.D., Ph.D., 2014