“Military officer creates beauty between wars - San Francisco Gate”

Military officer creates beauty between wars - San Francisco Gate

Posted: 01 Jan 2011 08:50 AM PST

"They were doing something real big," he said. "It wasn't figurative. It was almost untouchable. There was a bigness to it that I liked with some of the concepts they were taking on. When a person is painting a figure, that is pretty concrete. But when you are doing something like Gottlieb or Diebenkorn or Motherwell, they are trying to capture a yearning or an idea. They are addressing a much larger topic."

Asia also affected his art, especially Japan. "It has a very subtle but alluring culture," he said. "It kind of creeps up on you, and the next thing, you are enamored by the monuments and how the people conduct themselves. I liked it." During his time in Okinawa as a second lieutenant, and to the amusement of his fellow Marines, Richardson set up a studio in his living quarters. Prowling the streets of Tokyo he was struck by the stone markers at temples and businesses inscribed in Kanji, the Chinese characters that led to the modern Japanese writing system. They became a visual inspiration for the "Trojan War" paintings.

During a later tour in South Korea he had small canvases made for him by a carpenter, hauled them back to his studio on his bicycle, painted symbols on the individual squares and then clamped them together to form larger works, part of his "R Series," also at the Ralls. The faint arrows, similar to the directional markings on a tactical map, are one of the rare carryovers from his military world.

Scorching days

The catalog for the show mentions his travels to Japan and Korea, but at his request never suggests that his military service took him there. In 2006, this reporter spent several scorching days with him and his 11-man team in Anbar province, when he was an adviser to the Iraqi Army. To his frustration he had watched from the sidelines as a Naval ROTC instructor at George Washington University while his Marine buddies headed for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He eventually secured a role by volunteering to be a mentor to Iraqi forces.

In Anbar, home to a virulent insurgence, the region had yet to be calmed by the alliance of tribes and American forces, later reinforced by the surge of United States troops in 2007. After fighting alongside the Iraqis in the province's capital of Ramadi - combat that led the military to award Richardson the Bronze Star for valor - he and his Marines were holed up with Iraqi troops in a dilapidated soap factory in Fallujah. During the long lulls between patrols he never hinted that he had a passion for art.

"It's been pretty compartmentalized," Richardson said about his two lives, before taking off for his most recent training at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. "My father taught me to talk the talk. You don't talk about art with the Marines, and you don't talk about the Marines with artists."

This article appeared on page E - 5 of the San Francisco Chronicle

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