When I ask people about where Richard Pickman is today, most of them dodge the question. They tell me that they knew someone who knew someone who knew him, or they say they just don’t care, before asking me four or five questions about him. A common response is the stinkeye, like even mentioning Richard was associating yourself with something sleazy; a sordid ritual performed in Boston’s least savoury back rooms away from prying eyes. And I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Richard didn’t get on with people; he had a way of pushing them away even if he didn’t mean to.
You’re probably not shocked to hear that someone who went to a typical Boston art school was eccentric, but even by art school standards, Richard was an outcast. When every other student wanted to be a Monet or a Turner, Richard wanted to be a Fuseli or a Clark Ashton Smith. While the other pupils were in their element painting life models and mountainsides, Richard would sketch warped monsters of his own creation and spend hours painstakingly composing portraits of anguished demons. I once told him they looked like something out of a Clive Barker novel, but he said he’d never read one. The happiest I ever saw Richard was after he painted “Ghoul Feeding” which was exactly what it sounds like and hung in his house above the fireplace until the day he moved out.
Richard’s paintings were not beautiful, at least, not in the way we usually mean when we say “beautiful”. They made people uncomfortable, and that meant people talked to Richard less and less. They painted as far away from him as they could without looking petty. Richard was weird, but that’s what drew me to him. I’ve got my own share of quirks. I never felt comfortable riding the subway, so I take cabs everywhere. When I was a kid, I carried a plastic figurine of a gargoyle with me at all times; I was inseparable from it. Me and Richard were two weirdos who got each other, and that’s the foundation our friendship was built on. But even I had to admit that I didn’t always know how to react to the things he’d say when he got carried away.
Once, he told me that his great great great great grandmother was an honest-to-god witch and that officials burned her at the stake because she wouldn’t stop casting spells on the townspeople. Someone I spoke to for this story, who asked that we not name him, said that Richard once told him Cotton Mather had visions of hell that he’d written in books now lost to time. For the record, I don’t believe Richard was ever trying to trick people with these stories; I think he just had an active imagination. From what I can tell, he didn’t see a difference between his paintings and the tall tales he’d pass along; they were all just a chance to get creative.
But after the stories started, even his teachers kept their distance. As Richard felt less able to talk with everyone else, he confided more in me. I learned that he painted outside class and that outside of art, Richard’s big passion was Massachusetts history; he must have read every library book on it twice. He was proud of his North End home: he said that’s where a real artist would live, that his useless landlord and clanky water heater were worth putting up with to live in a piece of history. He only invited me there once, about a week before he moved out: the point at which everyone seems to lose track of him.
Richard didn’t mind about my fear of the subway; he was happy to take me up to the North End in his old Ford, slowing down to point out the street names, and talk about the early New England governors like Andros and Phipps whose political careers were intertwined with the city. Even the building he lived in looked like it hadn’t been renovated since the 18th century. The entrance was two enormous slabs of iron with intricate swirling patterns etched into them. His home was on the first floor, high ceilings, oak-panelled walls, and while Richard’s a friend, I have to say that it wasn’t the cleanest place I’ve ever seen. Plates piled up in the sink, and the walls were covered in a visible layer of dirt.
My host flipped between dutiful politeness and vengeful enthusiasm about his paintings. He was eager to show me a gallery that he’d been working on for years but had never seen the light of day. According to him, this was because it would upset the snooty Newbury Street crowd and offend their dated tastes, but I wondered whether he was covering for something else. A lack of confidence, maybe. After a drink, he threw open the doors to his studio, which looked even more worm-eaten than the living room. Almost every one of Richard’s pictures was of morbid creatures with rubbery skin that stopped just short of being human. They slumped forwards with faces more canine than anything. Pickman painted them in graveyards, in forests, in tunnels, and in mausoleums. He taught me what a charnel house was and then showed me his demons feeding inside one. My editor won’t let me say what they were feeding on.
Subwayphobia aside, I’m not a nervous person, but somewhere between the dingy decor of the studio, the dim light, and the hideous paintings, I was deeply unsettled. We went from pictures of the monsters in remote locations to paintings of them creeping into peoples’ homes at night or smashing through the windows. In one image, they were crowding around a sleeping child’s throat. Other pictures showed more human or more animalistic versions of the beasts, like Richard was hinting at an evolutionary lineage. You could see he’d spent hours detailing the faces that leered out of the canvas but never seemed entirely different from us.
They reminded me of a story I’d been told as a kid. I remember running about the house one night, yelling at the top of my lungs and knocking things off of shelves. To try and calm me down, my grandmother told me a fable about the changelings: animals that stole babies from cribs and left their own pups in their place. When I saw a painting Richard called The Lesson, it’s like he’d seen right into my head and painted my memory onto the canvas. It showed the dog people circling around a child, teaching him to eat like them.
We moved through a chilly corridor to a second studio where Richard stored what he called his “Modern Studies”. Keeping one hand on the tiled wall, he warned me that this was where he’d let himself go. Given what I’d just seen, this flushed me with anxiety. The paintings here looked more recent, closer in style to what I’d seen him produce in the class, and it was hard to feel like he wasn’t revelling in the violence of some of them. He drew the not-humans crawling up through the earth and overrunning puritans, storming down subway tracks and killing commuters on the platform. And as soon as the blood and gore started, it stopped. A picture leaning against the wall in one corner of the room showed the things reading from a Boston guidebook, laughing and spasming. In a theatrical voice, he told me that he called this one “Holmes, Lowell, and Longfellow Lie Buried in Mount Auburn”. If you know what that means, drop me a line.
Just when I thought we were finished, Richard told me that there was one last room where he’d been experimenting. His word, not mine. I could have said that I’d had enough, that these paintings made me uncomfortable. But I figured that I didn’t come this far to not see some of the riskiest work in Boston’s underground art scene. He held a torch at arm’s length and guided me down an unlit rotting staircase that felt like it could give way at any moment. The basement at the bottom had a feature I’d never seen before: there was a well set into the centre with a round wooden board over the top. In the yellow light, I caught glimpses of unfinished drafts, all of more dog people. Richard shooed me away from his works in progress, a true artist right to the end of the tour.
He presented the place like a ceremony room, organised around his magnum opus, as yet untitled. It was a portrait of an exaggerated, wrongly proportioned version of one of the gargoyles from before. It had bones jutting out of the skin and was about three times the height of a man. I knew that because Richard gave a point of comparison. It held a mould-encrusted corpse in its claws and had chewed right through its neck. The paint was barely dry on this one, only making the red look more like thick blood.
Then something happened that I couldn’t have predicted. There was scurrying from under the well cover like rats climbing upwards, and Richard practically pushed me out of the room before closing the door tight and locking it. I heard a gunshot and started sweating bullets; I screamed his name in the confusion. There was the shriek of metal on metal and the bang of something heavy colliding with the concrete floor. When Richard opened the door again, he did so to only a crack and slipped right through it. I could tell he was flustered, but he explained that part of his dispute with his landlord was an unresolved rodent problem. I didn’t know what to say, so I sheepishly told him I’d had the same thing at my last apartment. After the gunfire incident, he quickly ushered me out of his home, but he was apologetic and stuffed a crumpled photograph that he used for his studies into my hand: compensation.
I still don’t know what to make of that night at Richard’s place. I didn’t know if it was Richard, for the first time, acting out one of his fantastical stories; him performing overzealous pest control; or something else. I still haven’t looked at the photo because I guess I like keeping the mystery alive; Richard certainly did. As for the paintings, I think it would be easy to call Richard sick or demented for what he made, and maybe I give him too much credit, but I still believe in my heart that Richard was misunderstood. A good artist sees something in the world that the rest of us don’t, and they make it real. What they see isn’t always pretty, but it takes a lot of bravery to witness something as grotesque as Richard saw in the world and not to look away. To spend hour after hour putting it to canvas, even when you thought no one would else ever lay eyes on it. I couldn’t find Richard Upton Pickman, but I hope wherever he is now, he’s found someone who understands his demons.
