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“Monument Valley”
“Sierra Snow”
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“Skye”
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Born in McClellanville, South Carolina, Richard Lofton’s interest in painting was activated by receiving a box of oil paints when he was twelve. He followed family tradition by attending The Citadel, but after graduation in 1928, he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design in New York, where he spent a few months. Thereafter followed a five-year period of self-teaching and experimentation in the isolation of McClellanville. From this he emerged to take the position of director of the municipal art school in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he met and married Nancy Schallert. After service in World War II, which took him to California to train troops, he settled with his family in Carmel and became an active participant in the life of the art-minded community.
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He had frequent exhibitions in California and won both critical and popular success as a painter of portraits and landscapes, as a draftsman and watercolorist. One critic says of his portraits: “Painted at high speed in a loose, slashingly broad technique, the artist has caught not only an unmistakable outer semblance of the sitter, but that psychological essence without which a portrait is a dead and mechanical thing.” Another says of his landscapes: “In many of these he has achieved brilliant effects, breath-taking depth, a sense of unlimited expanse, unrestrained by the picture’s frame.”
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