Loryn Brazier, after 23 years, closed shop at Brazier Gallery last week.
But she’s not quitting.
Loryn Brazier in 1999 with the portrait she painted of former Virginia governor and Richmond mayor L. Douglas Wilder, part of the collection at the National Portrait Gallery (Photo courtesy Loryn Brazier)
The artist, who established herself here as a portrait painter and exhibitor, is ending the sales side of her endeavors to concentrate more on the part that interests her most: painting.
Brazier moved from Carytown to a Main Street space that joined a cluster of arts and related establishments.
“I’ve been in business for 23 years,” she says, seated in her comfortable, sunlit studio just behind the formal gallery. “I think I moved here seven years ago, about that,” she says, laughing. “I don’t do time.”
Also seven years ago, she began Plein Air Richmond, which brings together outdoors from-life painters from across the country. The event partners with a nonprofit, the Richmond SPCA for this year's event in June. Brazier intends to continue and expand the endeavor. She’s got plenty of ideas and, after last week, the time to implement them.
“I’m feeling really good about it,” she says of moving beyond the role of gallerist. The decision wasn’t forced by a lack of sales or even of interest in the work, she says. Even as we spoke, the phone rang and people came in, expressing their disappointment in the gallery’s closing.
Brazier studied fashion illustration and commercial art at Richmond Professional Institute (later Virginia Commonwealth University) and worked for Richmond fashion merchandiser LaVogue, the Martin Agency and fashion magazines. Then she and husband Doug took a European sojourn that introduced Brazier to the work of Danish artist Peter Severin Kroyer.
“I loved the stories he tells,” she explains with enthusiasm. “He’d paint the whole town, he’d paint them burning the bonfires to send the witches back to Germany on [June 21, Midsummer]. He’d paint whole governments or an entire art committee.” This concept of large paintings full of people inspired Brazier for one of her most important commissions, that of the business executives who backed the opening of the VCU School of Engineering.
“I wanted to paint like him,” Brazier says of Kroyer. “We recently went back to Denmark and revisited his work. I still love it, and I still want to paint like him.”
Brazier's portrait of mentor Everett Raymond Kinstler (Photo by Harry Kollatz Jr.)
After the first introduction, however, Brazier sought a teacher and found one in Everett Raymond Kinstler. Kinstler, at 93, is still working. A Brazier portrait of him, looking stern and holding a clutch of brushes, keeps an eye on her studio space. “He’s not as severe as he looks there,” she says. “He’s very funny.” Kinstler has visited Richmond and given talks. His illustrious client list includes eight U.S. presidents, painted from life.
Brazier studied, painted and made a career. She received further motivation from a 1995 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts exhibition, “America Around 1900: Impressionism, Realism and Modern Life.” The show featured artists including Cecilia Beaux, George Bellows, Mary Cassatt, Childe Hassam, Robert Henri and John Singer Sargent.
“[The exhibition] was packed all the time,” she remembers. “You could hardly get in there.”
Brazier didn’t see much of this style of work in Richmond, especially in galleries, where abstract and experimental works predominated. She opened shop in Carytown to make a public studio that could receive walk-in business.
She thought of running a gallery as a “cool job.” “You’re going into retail while you have your own studio. You don’t have to purchase anything. People bring it to you. People are asking you, they’re begging you, to take what they’re making.”
Portrait studies from Brazier's Richmond studio (Photo by Harry Kollatz Jr.)
As an artist, Brazier wanted a gallery that displayed representations of her work at all times, alongside that of other painters. For the most part, she didn’t show other Richmonders, because she didn’t want to be the person who turned down the entreaties of neighboring artists. She also thought there were any number of other galleries where Richmond-based work is regularly shown. Thus, she called upon artists in other cities who were painting in a manner realistic or impressionistic.
“I wanted some different work made by people from elsewhere,” she says.
Her roster included Mark Laguë, from Montreal, Canada — Brazier was the first U.S gallery to exhibit his work. Others were Nashville painter Dawn Whitelaw, Charleston, South Carolina-based Larry Moore, and world citizen and Venice, Italy-dwelling Maggie Siner.
Brazier credits Siner for giving her the idea of opening a Main Street gallery, while she retained the Carytown studio.
“We were going to have workshops here. And then Maggie Siner came and said, ‘You can do a gallery here.’ And that settled it."
When Brazier arrived, the space consisted of little more than a metal roof and a cement floor, a shell that she designed as she wanted with windows and a second-floor loft space. Here she had ample room for the gallery and a working studio. She made the School of Engineering founders piece in her Carytown studio, though, 12 feet long and 7 feet high. The work took nine months to complete. She didn’t have the space to get a good view of her progress.
She recalls, “When I wanted to see what it looked like, I had to wait until night and go across the street to Mary Angela’s and look at it from [the pizza restaurant’s] windows.” She worked around busy executives’ schedules for sittings, and used stand-ins to capture details, such as the folds of clothing.
VCU chose who’d be in the piece and where they’d go. At first, just heads and shoulders were requested, but that didn’t interest Brazier, who thought “it was like a factory.” She hearkened back to the Kroyer paintings, and that approach interested university officials.
The National Portrait Gallery has in its collection her 1999 portrait of Governor L. Douglas Wilder. “He came and posed a few times, but he seemed fairly busy,” Brazier says. Her present project is a portrait of the first female director of Newport News Shipbuilding, Jennifer Boykin.
Brazier says she’ll use the Main Street space for workshops and other programs.
