I first ran into Landon Richmond in April, when he was selling his art prints at his spot on the west end of Newbury Street. He told me he had started selling his art about a year ago, when he decided to make a living off of it as best as possible. “I’m not fucking around,” he said.
He’s been painting awhile. “In kindergarten, I got in trouble because I drew a picture of Superman destroying the city,” he told me. After a difficult time in high school, he went to Berklee School of Music. “I went there just to be a rock star,” he recalled; he dropped out. Later, he tried journalism and art at Suffolk but never wanted to learn the skills they were trying to teach him. “They said ‘Stop resisting,’” he remembered. Eventually, he dropped out of there, too.
The prints he was selling that day – of his original paintings, selling for $10 a pop – were, in a word, dark. In one, a humanoid body with a rabbit head languishes on top of a pile of eggs, hypodermic needles stuck in his arms. A messy composition which is hard to decipher is captioned with a scrawl: “Batman decided to Become A Naked, Androgynous Red-eyed Mutant.” Another is labeled, “New Models on Sale”. The new models seem to be creatures with vulture heads and maggot bodies whose tails form a water-filled jar…with a dead goldfish. I could see the influences that Landon had already mentioned: Ralph Steadman (known for the cover of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”) and the art of Pink Floyd’s movie “Another Brick in the Wall.”
I asked if he ever thought people just “didn’t get” his art, but he said that he doesn’t discriminate much between buyers. “I lost distinction between people – fat, old, young, rich, poor,” he said. “There’s a darkness in everyone’s life.” A little later, a customer was trying to decide between two prints, and Landon crouched down, earnestly counseling him: “Oh, you can’t choose? Which one speaks to you?”
He was working at a gym to make ends meet, but he hoped to some day open his own store. “I have a product and I need to sell it. I believe in it…A lot of artists’ downfall is that they paint and don’t care about the business.”
(courtesy of Landon Richmond)
As we sat there, a small group of twenty-somethings agreed to buy a stack of prints for a deal. Eventually, it came down to haggling over a t-shirt with a buff guy with spiked hair from California wearing a t-shirt with the kind of print Landon might have made himself. As they bargained over the price, the guy gently tried to talk Landon down, explaining how he was going to give Landon “exposure” in California in a tone of voice that suggested he knew how cheesy this might sound, but enjoying it anyway. Landon seemed to enjoy the back-and-forth, finally acquiescing: “You’re a dick, and I’ll take your 20,” he said cheerfully.
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