Diane Nelson tribute to Richard:!

Hello everyone. It is wonderful to see so many of you gathered here to honor Richards
life on the anniversary of his birth, 78 years ago. Most of you know who I am, but for
those who do not, my name is Diane Nelson, and Richard and I were friends for 59
years, all of our adult lives really.!

He, Lucia and I met as freshman art students at the Boston Museum School in 1956,
when we were just 18 years old. It occurs to me that, with the exception of Richards
brother Bob and sister Nancy, I knew him longer than anyone else in this room. !

And I would be the last of any of us here to see him, an hour and a half before he died at
Mass General over a year ago. I remember that he was really looking forward to having
chocolate ice cream for dessert and later reports from the attending nurse said that
when she last saw him, he was happily licking the ice cream container, exclaiming it was
the best chocolate ice cream that he had ever tasted. Thinking about that last image still
makes me smile.!

But way back in the beginning are those first memories from freshman art school days,
when we all became aware of the fact that Richard was an exceptional talent indeed,
with extremely advanced drawing skills in particular. It was not unusual for many of us to
wander into his daily life drawing class adjacent to our own to see how Richard Edlund
was doing, and admire his superior efforts. If very few of us would become as
accomplished in drawing as he, he certainly inspired the rest of us to at least work
harder and to become better at it.!

I sat behind him in Freshman Design Class and soon learned that he also possessed a
unique way of looking at the world too, seeing beauty and value in what was deemed
not pretty by most of the rest of us. !

An early assignment was to select a creature in Nature and extrapolate its features and
reconfigure them into various fabric designs. While many of us chose creatures with
obviously beautiful design elements, ( I used a peacock ), Richard selected a plain
scary-looking black beetle as his motif. Wow, I remember thinkingthis guy IS different.
That was just the beginning!

In a painting class, the students were asked to find something on their way home and
make studies of it. Richard lived in Dorchester and found a dead rat on the sidewalk and
picked that up for this assignment. His Mother eventually had to throw it out, but the
excellent dead rat studies still exist for those who might like to see them sometime. !


He had great respect for other species, and a word that he really disliked was cute,
particularly when applied to them. On more than one occasion he would lament the fact
that the wildlife organizations he supported only used photos of the adorable-looking
animals in their advertising. He was very disapproving of what he considered a lop-sided
value practice.!

How was I to know back in those student days that he and Lucia would eventually marry
and they and their families would become so richly woven into the tapestry of my life?!

In the early sixties, we three enjoyed a post-graduation period of living in Chicago

archaeology work on Lucias older brother Nick Millets expedition at Gebbel Adda, on
the banks of the Nile River in Nubia, Egypt.followed by travels in Greece, Crete, Rome
& Florence afterwards.!

In the late sixties Richard and I would also work together for over a year as designers in
the Education Division of American Science & Engineering in Boston, he as a product
designer and and I as a graphic designer. Following that, he became the leading identity
designer at Selame Design in Newton, creating logos that we still see around us today,
like the logo for the Shaws supermarket chain. !

By then he and Lucia were living in the house called Evergales, that special place next
to the cranberry bog in Pembroke with their two wonderful and talented sons, Nick &
Ben, and lots of animals of course. A decade later, in the late seventies, they would
generously welcome me into their home to share their family life for ten yearsa great
gift to me, for which Ill always be grateful. !

With the sad passing of Lucia, all of our lives changed of course. I was living back in
Boston by then, but Richard continued the annual Edlund family tradition of spending
every Christmas Eve with my family and I at the home of my brother Jim and sister-inlaw Maggie in Middleboro, for a final total of 37 years with an Edlund presence. !

But we created a new tradition as well, that of meeting up at the Museum of Fine Arts to
see new shows Often we mused over the fact that both of us had been going to this
building longer than any other building in our entire lives.!

We always followed our Museum visits with dinner, either in Boston or Harvard Square.
Occasionally we went on to hear jazz afterwards, which we both loved, and which he
played every day on his own keyboard, and other instruments. At various venues, we
heard such jazz greats as Dave Brubeck, Herbie Hancock and Wynton Marsalis, to
mention just a few, as well as many lesser known artists. !

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I would refer to these days as MMM Daysthree capital Ms signifying Museum, Meals
and Music.!

On one of those days in 2013, the Steinway Piano Company Play Me project had come
to Boston. Pianos, brightly painted in all sorts of designs, had been placed outside
around the city, and people were encouraged to just sit down and play them.!

There in front of the museum was one of these pianos, and Richard sat down and
entertained myself and other smiling bystanders with some lively improvised jazz. We
loved it and all applauded of course. A wonderful memory and a different take on our
Museum and Music days, with Richard providing the Music.!

But what I miss most about Richard is his offbeat wit and humor, love of any absurd
news story, and thoughtful, often hilarious critical insights into contemporary art work
exhibited in those Museum galleries. He revered the Masters, particularly John Singer
Sargent, for his economy of brushstrokes that provided such complex imagesand any
contemporary art that showed real skill and depthbut he had little time for superficial or
pretentious art work accompanied by any art jargon attempting to justify its importance. !

I have visited the museum often in the past year and have tried to imagine what admiring
or clever amusing observation Richard would have to say about this new work or that.
Of course I cantbut I smile anyway.!

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I will now read these tributes from two other old art school friends, Dolly Blodgett
Spaulding in Tucson and Bob Higgins (Higgy) in Maine, and from Reinhard (Reini) Huber
in Zurich Switzerland, an artist teammate from that long ago dig in Egypt, all of whom he
kept in touch with, and who thought the world of him.!

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Reading of the 3 old friends tributes. !
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Finally, we four are so grateful to have had Richard as a friend for almost 60 years. And
a very special friend he was indeed. !

Lucky us.!