When R. Douglass Rice paints portraits, he usually invites the people into his studio, where they sit in a 1950s teak-and-leather Danish chair for an hour and a half. Artist and subject chat, and Rice says, “There’s an amazing dialogue, just listening to them and talking to them and seeing where it goes.”

Those exchanges are one of the aspects that Rice has loved about painting portraits.

With the isolation imposed by COVID-19, though, that hasn’t been possible.

Rice is quarantining at the Stonington home he moved to from New York City about four-and-a-half years ago, property that was formerly owned by a dairy farmer (Rice set up his studio in what used to be a cow shed).

Rice and his wife, Cynthia Elliott, have been sequestered there with son Jackson, daughter-in-law Jennifer and 8-year-old grandson Teddy. Rice has been spending a lot of time in his studio, trying to stay out of the way as his grandson is homeschooled during the day.

“I thought, ‘Gosh, it’s so sad I can’t have anyone in here to sit and paint,’ so I came up with the idea of creating a virtual community of friends,” Rice says.

His message seeking submissions, he recalls, said that “in this kind of isolation, we’re all away from each other, and since I can no longer have anyone in my studio to sit for me, I would like to propose that my virtual friends and my real friends send me a selfie. The first 50 people who send me a selfie, I will paint their portrait by June 30.

“I got 95 responses.”

Rice is true to his word and is working his way through those selfies, transforming them each into a separate expressionist painting (he had warned folks in his announcement that they shouldn’t expect photorealism). He plans on creating portraits of not just the first 50 but of all of the selfies submitted, although the entirety won’t be completed by the original June 30 deadline.

Rice has gone beyond just painting; he is also creating a virtual community among the people featured in the portraits.

“As I’ve painted them, I’ve created this Facebook group called Portraits of Friends in Isolation, and as each person gets painted, I invite them into this group. I encourage them to meet each other, to check in on each other and to celebrate each other … The idea is to try to create a virtual community in isolation,” Rice says.

By the time he had completed 24 portraits recently, 12 of the subjects had joined the Facebook group. 

Rice says that one of the amazing aspects of the project is how it has put him in touch with so many friends. He has answered each person who contacted him and says, “I’ve been able to find out what they’re doing, where they are, who’s with them. I’ve been able to communicate with all these people I wouldn’t have necessarily had an opportunity to.”

Along with friends and neighbors from Stonington, he is painting pals from boarding school and college; his yoga teacher; a 96-year-old woman who was a film producer and lived next to his mother in Palm Springs before moving to Switzerland; and the daughter of a man he has worked with, an 8-month-old girl who has Down Syndrome.

The public can see the portraits now by visiting @r_d_rice on Instagram or Rice’s Facebook page.

Local faces among them

Among the local people featured in the portraits is Arlene Piacquadio. She knows Rice through her being the president of the Artists’ Cooperative Gallery of Westerly, where he’s a member. “He’s a great guy and a great artist,” she says.

The selfie that she sent in was dark, literally. (Rice recalls the image as almost completely black, but, if he really stared at it, he could start to discern her eyes and nose.)

“It was a very dark photo, sort of the way I was feeling about being quarantined,” Piacquadio says with a laugh.

She notes that, while the various portraits that Rice has created so far don’t look alike, they “all have a similarity, so that’s an interesting part of it — we all look connected somehow … It’s a wonderful message to send.”

Piacquadio says, “I hope that — and I’m going to mention this to him — that he’ll have a display (of the portraits) in our gallery when we’re fully back and operational. I think it would be a wonderful, wonderful display to have.”

Alisa Morrison, a Stonington resident who used to live next door to Rice, sent in her selfie when she got Rice’s message about the project. She says that it’s been fun (hers was one of the first dozen portraits finished) and that she joined the Facebook group he set up. The group members, who live all over and come from diverse backgrounds, chat about how they know Rice, for instance, and how they’re doing in quarantine.

“It’s a really great way to develop a community of totally random people … to connect with people you would never, ever connect with (otherwise),” she says.

Biographical details

Rice, who recently turned 68, has been an artist for nearly 40 years. He grew up in Sewickley, Penn., and San Francisco, Calif. He took his first sculpture class when he was a student at Phillips Exeter Academy, and he studied sculpture at Stanford University, where he majored in human biology. (He still does sculpture.)

Rice raised his family in New York City’s Soho District, and, while doing his art in his Tribeca studio, he ran a high-end residential construction company from 1987 to 2015.

He is a member of the National Arts Club and was chair of the Bronx Museum of the Arts’ board of trustees. Now that he’s in Stonington, he’s become an Elected Artist at the Mystic Museum of Art and a member of the Lyme Art Association and the Bristol Art Museum.

He’s involved in the community in other ways; he works at the New London Community Meal Center twice a week.

In a Ralph Lauren face mask

For Rice’s “Portraits of Friends in Isolation” project, people got to decide how they wanted him to see them.

“It was not my choice on how they were going to look. I interpret from their photographs, but they are choosing how they want to dress, where they want the photograph to be, what’s in the background, what expression they have,” he says.

A few folks sent in pictures of themselves wearing face masks. A friend of Rice’s from his New York days who is a sharp dresser submitted a photo of himself wearing a Ralph Lauren suit — and a Ralph Lauren handkerchief as a face mask.

As for the painting process, Rice says, “Over the last 40 years, I have so many bad paintings that I never throw away, so I’ve been painting over really bad paintings. It’s great because, underneath, you get all these colors.”

He places the selfie on the wall and then puts the canvas on a small easel. He draws with charcoal to make the outline and then uses a palette knife to apply really thick paint to the canvas. That thick paint is so wet that he has to let it dry for at least a week. Then, he uses a mixture of paint, varnish, turpentine and linseed oil, and he goes over the painting, reinforcing detail.

Before he posts the completed portrait, he emails a copy to the subject.

“This project has brought me out of my own isolation. It has put me in communication with people all over the world,” Rice says.

Rice has the portraits he has completed displayed on the walls of his studio.

“When I am in my studio and look around me, I see the faces of friends with whom I’m now in touch with and feel less isolated,” he says.