Richard has drawn since he could hold a crayon, but he didn't pick up a brush for nine years after he got sick. In 1993 the art room at his day program had a box of acrylics nobody was using. He painted a coffee cup. Then he painted another one. He has painted something almost every week since.

We don't own a scanner, and even if we did, Richard says a scanned painting "looks like a painting of a painting." So I have described some of them here as well as I can. He chose which ones, read what I wrote, corrected my colors more than once, and added a sentence of his own about each. Myron has added the sizes, because he is Myron.

— Mary

Two Cups, 1993
Acrylic on canvas board, 9 x 12 inches

The second coffee cup. A plain white diner mug on a brown table, with a second mug just behind it, half out of the picture. The paint is thick and careful, like someone remembering how. It hangs over our kitchen sink, and I look at it every morning.

Richard: "The first one I threw away. This one I kept because the handle came out right."

Lake Erie, February, 1994
Acrylic on canvas, 16 x 20 inches

Almost all gray and white. Ice heaped along the shore in broken plates, a gray lake going out to a gray sky, and the line between them so faint you have to stand close to find it. In the lower corner, very small, one black bird on the ice. People who visit always walk right up to this one.

Richard: "This was the first winter it was quiet enough in my head to notice how quiet it was outside."

Bus Stop, Snow, 1995
Acrylic on canvas board, 11 x 14 inches

A bus shelter at night under a streetlight, with snow coming down in soft yellow dots. A woman in a red scarf is waiting with a grocery bag. Her face isn't painted in, just a pale shape. The red scarf is the only bright color in the picture, and you can't stop looking at it.

Richard: "I waited at that stop every day for two years. She was there a lot. We never talked but we nodded."

Bread Slicer, 4 A.M., 1996
Acrylic on canvas, 18 x 24 inches

The back room of the bakery where he works, painted from memory. Steel tables, racks of loaves cooling, the big bread slicer, and a window with the sky just going from black to dark blue. Everything is lit warm and gold from the ovens. Mr. Laub asked to buy it. Richard gave it to him instead, and it hangs behind the front counter. Customers ask about it.

Richard: "I like the bakery before anybody comes in. It's the only place I know that smells the same every single day."

Dad's Adding Machine, 1997
Acrylic on canvas board, 12 x 16 inches

Myron's old office adding machine, the gray one with the paper roll, sitting on our dining room table on a Sunday afternoon in April, with a long curl of tape running off the edge of the table and onto the floor. Every key is there. Richard painted it in four Sundays while Myron did our taxes, and Myron didn't know until it was finished. He keeps it in his den and won't let anybody else hang it.

Richard: "He always said the numbers have to add up. I wanted to paint something that does."

Amy's Front Steps, 1997
Acrylic on canvas, 16 x 20 inches

His sister's front porch in summer, with a pair of small sneakers, a red wagon and a watering can on the steps, and pots of geraniums on either side. No people in it at all, but you know exactly who lives there. It hangs in Amy's front hall, and her children like to show visitors that the wagon is theirs.

Richard: "For my sister, who never gave up on me even when she had good reason to."

Self-Portrait with a Blue Cup, 1998
Acrylic on canvas board, 11 x 14 inches

Richard at his kitchen table in the apartment, in a gray sweatshirt, holding a blue mug in both hands and looking straight out at you. It is the only painting he has done of himself. He looks calm and a little tired, and very much like his grandfather. When I first saw it I had to sit down.

Richard: "It took me a long time to want to look at myself. This is what I look like now. It's okay."

The Green Chair, 1999
Acrylic on canvas, 20 x 24 inches (still drying)

His newest, finished in August. An old green armchair by a window, with afternoon light coming across it in a long stripe, and a paperback open face-down on the arm. It's the chair in his apartment, the one that used to be in our living room. The light on the fabric is so real you'd swear it was warm.

Richard: "Somebody's coming right back to that chair. That's the whole idea."

Richard says that if anyone would like to write to him about his paintings, they may send a letter to our address below and we'll print it out for him. He doesn't have a computer, and says he doesn't want one, "because then I'd have to paint the computer."