"The Enormous Room" by Richard Brown Lethem

Poem by Richard Lethem
Shot and edited by Dennis Callaci

Richard Brown Lethem

Richard Brown Lethem (b. 1932) has been living and thinking in paint on canvas since the 1950s, with results that have been categorized, more or less aptly, as abstraction, expressionism, figuration, social realism, surrealism, and allegory. Now in his 90s, Lethem’s imagery has become unified and direct, often consisting of a central form derived from nature, yet distilled by the visionary pressure of his attention into symbols directly drawn from his psychic landscape, and beamed into that of the viewer. Lethem’s first book on Bamboo Dart Press, Roots, Stones and Baggage, was a collection of paintings and poems spanning seven decades. A recent show of his paintings was on view at the Inman Gallery in Texas and he has an upcoming exhibit at The Claremont Lewis Museum in California.