THE RICHMOND NEWS LEADER

They pave paradise, then he paints it. HABITAT By Ann Holiday

Artist Parks Duffey could call his latest exhibition "Torn Down for Parking."

That appears to have been the fate of many of the buildings he has painted for "Lost Richmond," his tribute to Richmond architecture of bygone years.

Moldavia, the childhood home of Edgar Allan Poe, stood at 3 S. 5th St. There's a parking lot there, between the Virginia Chamber of Commerce and a real estate office on the corner.

A parking lot occupies the site of an 1859 house that became Powell's School, then a home for needy Confederate women at 3 E. Grace St.

The site of the Cunningham-Archer House, an elegant house at 6th and Franklin streets that was a center of social activity became one of Richmond's first parking decks in the 1930s.

"It seems like everything in the city has been turned into a parking lot," Duffey said as he stood among the paintings in an upstairs gallery at Suitable for Framing.

Gone, but not forgotten. Duffey looked through mezzotints, photographs, prints, architectural plans, insurance maps and descriptions at the Valentine Museum to discover the Richmond of a century or two ago.

He's interpreted them in the sophisticatedly primitive style that has earned his paintings places in private collections in the United States, the Caribbean, Great Britain, France, Italy, Switzerland and Japan.

Banners wave in the breezes, horses prance along the streets, people walk about, and the buildings stand as they did in history and in Duffey's imagination. He plans to turn these paintings and some to come into a book on Richmond.

"I want to show what it looked like not only from photographs, but let it come back to life," Duffey said. "I also want to do interior scenes. Plus, I want to make people aware they don't have to tear down any more buildings."

The Adams-Van Lew House was one of the finest examples of Greek Revival houses in Richmond, Duffey said. There was no public outcry when it was torn down in 1911 to build the Bellevue School.

That's probably due to the public's feelings toward Elizabeth Van Lew, who was said to be a Union spy during the Civil War, to have kept her Christmas decorations up all year, and to have had more than 40 cats.

Duffey has painted someone sneaking in a window, and at least half the cats are in the trees, on the roof and sneaking around in the snow.

"I've just started to get interested in winter scenes," he said. "I paint a lot of them in the Caribbean."

The Caribbean, where he has spent winters, also has influenced the colors in some of the paintings. Pastels are prominent, particularly in skies. The colors add to the lively feeling of the paintings.

And colors of buildings change from painting to painting. The State Capitol is partly exposed brick in an early scene, about 1810, taken from an engraving by Peter Maverick. It shows Mayo's Bridge, its toll booth, and the clapboard houses that made up the city at that time.

Later on, the Capitol is shown in various shades of gray and white, as it evolved.

The Edmund Randolph House and the first City Hall, designed by Robert Mills, show up behind the State Capitol in some of the paintings. When the floors in the Capitol collapsed, other public buildings became suspect, and many were condemned. Richmond legend has it that when the Mills City Hall was torn down in 1874, its walls were found to be rock-solid.

The city hall that replaced it, now called Old City Hall, was built where the Edmund Randolph House stood from about 1800 to 1884. The octagonal house may have been designed by Thomas Jefferson, Duffey said.

Not just the grand houses have been the subjects of Duffey's research and work. "Westover in a peanut shell" is the affectionate term for a freedman's house at 3116 M. St., long ago demolished. The simple brick house has two lean-to wings. Westover Plantation also has two wings, much grander, of course. The painting shows the freedman's home's owner, a bullock and cart and several chickens.

Some paintings are overall scenes of the city, some from Hollywood Cemetery, some from across the river.

Prominent in one view is the Gallego Flour Mills building, with four stories showing beneath roof level and two rows of dormers on the roof.

"It was one of the largest buildings in the country at the time," Duffey said, drawing from his studies in the museum archives. "At one time, it was the largest flour mill in the world."

Duffey also is working on a series of folding screens, shaped at the top to represent the rooflines of the city scenes, and paintings on panels from period houses.

He plans to paint in Charleston, S.C., for the Spoleto festival. "Down there," he said, "I don't have a problem with parking lots."

Captions from images: 1.)Parks Duffey pays tribute to Richmond architecture of bygone years with "Lost Richmond," a collection of paintings. 2.)In the painting of the Adams-Van Lew House, which was torn down in 1911 to build the Bellevue School, Duffey depicts many of Elizabeth Van Lew's 40 cats hanging around outside the house.

Click here if you would like to see a list of collections and schools.

To contact Parks Duffey, please call: (804) 938-1040 Email: PDuffey@art-usa.com Postal address: 529 High Street Petersburg, Virginia 23803 www.art-usa.com