Richard Morrison Lofton was born in McClellanville, a small village on the coast of South Carolina near Charleston, where his family has lived for many generations. An early aptitude for painting was fueled by the gift of a box of paints. He started painting in earnest and when he was 18 he submittted a portrait he’d done of his mother to the professional class at the State Fair, winning first prize and giving him a scholarship to the National Academy of Design in New York.  He studied there briefly, then decided he needed to learn to paint on his own. He studied anatomy, drawing with pen and ink, painted in oil and watercolor and did a series of woodblock prints of historic houses in Charleston. He graduated from The Citadel in 1928 with a B.A. in history.

Lofton then went to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to visit one of his many sisters, and was invited to become director of the city’s Municipal Art School, where met his wife Nancy Schallert. He remained there until WWII when he took up his commission in the army and ended up training troops at Fort Ord in California. After the war, his introduction to the beauty of the central coast led him to move with his wife and young daughter to Carmel, CA. Devoting himself to painting and drawing, he soon became fully involved in the thriving, fertile artistic community of the Monterey Peninsula as it was in the 40s, 50s and 60s.  There he was welcomed and inspired by well known local painters, sculptors, poets and musicians. He became a member of the Carmel Art Association and had many solo shows there, as well as serving on the Board. In between painting in Carmel and all the way down the coast to Big Sur, he taught private pupils in his Carmel studio.

Lofton traveled extensively. He returned yearly to McClellanville to be with his family and to paint the lush beauty of the Lowlands. He spoke fluent Gullah, having grown up among Gullah people, and painted a powerful series of paintings of the people there. He spent many springtimes painting and camping in Death Valley with a photographer friend. His series of desert paintings, all done plein air, conveys the wild intensity, harshness and quality of light and color. While camping, he did a series of pen and ink drawings in Canyon de Chelly. He traveled to Mexico to paint, as well as the high Sierras, where he would paint plein air in the snow, with a thermos of coffee to keep warm. Having been introduced to Point Lobos by photographer Edward Weston, he became entranced with a complete whale skeleton which was assembled near Whalers’ Cove. Perhaps due to his extensive knowledge and love of anatomy, this became the subject of numerous paintings and one of his favorite places to paint.

A skilled portraitist, Lofton accepted commissions and often traveled to paint his subjects. Perhaps his strongest series of portraits was of his fellow painters, sculptors, cartoonists, and photographers done mostly in the late 50s and early 60s.

Throughout his life, Lofton often chose mythological themes when painting in his studio. Minotaurs, satyrs, nymphs, goddesses populated these works, sometimes as anatomical drawings, sometimes raging battle in thick brilliant paint, sometimes seducing, sometimes as indistinct forms in otherworldly landscapes.

Nelly Montague, an old friend of Lofton’s and curator of the Carmel Art Association said of him in 1963

“many of America’s gifted and solidly trained painters give Lofton their highest compliment, calling him a painters’ painter.”

Richard Lofton died in 1966 of lung cancer. He was only 58 and in his prime as a painter.

- Melissa Lofton

Painter and daughter of Richard Lofton

2024

His work is in the collections of:

The H.M. DeYoung Memorial Museum of Art

The Santa Barbara Museum

The Cleveland Museum

The San Francisco Museum of Art

The Columbia Museum, South Carolina

The Staten Island Institute of Arts and Letters

Gibbes Art Gallery in Charleston, South Carolina

Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula

Monterey Public Library

Solo exhibitions:

The H.M DeYoung Memorial Museum of Art

The Santa Barbara Museum

The Lucien Labault Gallery, San Francisco

The University of San Francisco

The Carmel Art Association

Galerie De Tours, Carmel