Lamont Bland, Realist Portrait Artist, 54

[DGH]

.

Lamont K. Bland, a Washington D area artist who specialized in portraits
of children and the elderly, died of prostate cancer December 26 at his
home in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, at the age of 54.

Mr. Bland worked in charcoal, watercolors and acrylics, and his
paintings were known for an extraordinary degree of realism. "People
can't believe they're drawings, not photographs," he said of a 2001
exhibition of his work at the Prince George's Publick Playhouse in
Cheverly, Maryland.

Since doctors diagnosed his cancer six years ago, Mr. Bland had been
painting and drawing full time, and his work has been exhibited at East
Coast colleges, art shows and the National Urban League conference in
1997.

He was born in Washington DC and graduated from Fairmont Heights High
School and in 1970 from Morgan State University, where he studied art.
In college, he won several art prizes, including one for an oversize
painting of rock-and-roll singer and guitarist Jimi Hendrix, which was
so admired, Mr. Bland said, that "someone relieved the art department of
it before I could take it home."

After college, he took a job teaching art at the D.C. correctional
facility at Lorton, where, it turned out, he got his first lessons in
working in charcoal. "There were two inmates assisting me. They were
self-taught and doing a lot of work with charcoal. I had been mostly a
painter in college, but when I saw these, they were terrific,
outstanding. I asked them how they were producing this photographic
technique," Mr. Bland recalled in a 2001 interview with The Washington
Post.

Later in his career, Mr. Bland was a graphic artist with several
companies, including General Electric, then held a series of sales and
marketing jobs. He was an Amway salesman, sold burial insurance through
Pope Funeral Home and sold life insurance with Prime America, which
later became Conseco Life Insurance.

But art had always been his passion, and his inspiration was the human
face. "It's the expressions of people's faces ... . If I see a
photograph, and a kid is just smiling in a certain way -- whether
they're happy or a little sad, I like conveying that." When he was a
child, Mr. Bland liked to copy portraits of jazz musicians from record
albums. In high school, he created images of popular heros, including
the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

As a portrait artist, Mr. Bland often did commission work from
photographs, sometimes combining charcoal with watercolors, achieving a
result that in some ways resembled a photo collage.

Washington Post

.