Family portraits explore growing up adopted

By Kate Hayden, khayden@charlescitypress.com

Leah Richter is one of multiple artists to be featured at the 2017 ArtaFest, held on Aug. 19 at Charles City’s Central Park. Richter and many more will be showing and selling artwork from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Relationships are never finished. That’s what Leah Richter understands.

“Unfinished figures become real to each other. When you start a painting … you move to a place of being finished. Relationships are never finished. You’re always in the process,” Richter said about her work.

Richter works in oil paints on wood panels, and her subjects are her family. All four of her children are adopted — the family most recently adopted their second son in 2016 — and Richter incorporates their portraits in among loose, expressive flowers, rivers and contrastable, detailed anatomy illustrations to explore the highs and lows of growing relationships.

“I used anatomy illustrations because what I want to talk about, it wasn’t always pretty,” Richter said. “It’s visceral, intense and complex. I still have this deep, complex, intense relationship that’s just as valid.”

Richter’s paint structures scenes based off of family life for the viewers, but it also creates elaborate settings for them to live in.

“Sometimes the background is created from my imagination, or elaborated from my imagination. A lot of my recent work is from a recent vacation,” Richter said. “I want them to be sincere and real, and not every moment is a Kodak moment.”

It took time for Richter to develop that personal voice, even after she returned to art school as a non-traditional student.

“I was interested in talking about feminine identity and how that was represented in society, but I hadn’t figured out a way to talk about it that completely satisfied me. While I had been painting since I was a child, I hadn’t found a focus,” Richter said. “I just knew that I really loved art.”

As she and her husband fostered, and then adopted their children — her oldest daughter was the first to join the family at 3 years old, and is now 8 — Richter’s focus became clearer.

“I really firmly decided I wanted to be a social artist and advocate for children that needed to be adopted, especially in foster care. Children in foster care are especially stigmatized,” Richter said. “I don’t even like the word ‘orphan’. To be labeled by one tragedy in life for the rest of your life — it’s a way to stigmatize someone for the rest of their life.

“Someone … once asked, ‘What should we call them?’ They would want to be called children, not orphans,” she added. “My children are my treasure, not a burden to me. They are something to be celebrated.”

When Richter includes their portrait in one of her pieces, they notice. Richter started incorporating each of her children during the year-long foster period, which is required before formal adoption.

“Me incorporating them in a painting is saying, ‘you belong here,'” Richter said.

Now, “they expect to be in it,” she added with a little laugh.

The household creativity isn’t just limited to Mom, either. Richter shows them “a lot of art” and offers plenty of supplies to them.

“They’ve become pretty incredible little artists themselves just by encouragement and observing,” she said.

Richter is also sharing her message — after a few years focusing on family, she is scheduling more gallery shows and attending more art festivals. Her original art and prints are attracting attention from families and professionals alike. She just launched a new website, www.llrichter.com, where she hopes to feature an adopted family once a month to tell their story.

“It’s been really serendipitous and wonderful. Families will be drawn to my booth, and they happen to be an adoptive family,” Richter said. “I recently sold a few originals to a psychologist who works with traumatized children, and (the pieces) are hanging in her office … A lot of the children she works with have been adopted and are working through issues like trauma.”

“I think there are universal principals in the paintings,” she said. “An older couple (who purchased from Richter) said it was as if their home was haunted in a good way — they could see their children small again. That was a very interesting and sweet interpretation of my work.”

Richter’s portraits have a lot to say about the challenges of adoption — including individual trauma — but her pieces are also a moment of her children’s daily lives.

“It’s kind of bittersweet, because you don’t want them to stay little forever, but part of you wishes they could stay that little,” Richter said. “And then you remember potty training and you change your mind.”