After wrapping the heavy bronze in blankets, Richard Weaver carefully placed the bust in the back of his car.

  Driving his black 1988 Honda toward Lexington, he fretted about how his work would be received. Months earlier, he began work on the bust of John Chavis, the first African-American to receive a college education in the United States.

Washington and Lee University had commissioned the work. It was there that the black educator and Presbyterian minister completed his education in 1799, when the college was known as Washington Academy.

The bronze bust would grace the boardroom in the university’s new commons, which was completed last summer at a cost of $40 million. The room, which offers a bucolic view through large windows banking one wall, is dedicated to Chavis.

“I was concerned with how the bust was going to be lit, because lighting is very important to me,” Weaver said one recent rainy morning in his second-floor studio at the McGuffey Art Center.

“And I was concerned how professor Ted [Theodore C.] DeLaney, a history professor at the school and an authority on Chavis would think of the final image. I was hoping he would find it a sympathetic portrayal, because he had spent so much time with him during his research.

“It’s a beautiful room and the lighting turned out to be good. A friend of mine built a beautiful cherry stand for it, so I was very pleased.”

Weaver needn’t have worried about what DeLaney thought. The associate professor of history consulted with the artist before and during the bust’s creation. He said he couldn’t have been more pleased with the result.

“I think Rick is an incredible artist and the bust a masterpiece,” DeLaney said. “The reaction on the part of the folks here at the university is that it’s breathtaking and absolutely splendid.

“He prepared, at the university’s request, two final busts, one in bronze and the other in plaster that we can have for a backup in case something happened to the bronze. The plaster one graces my office, and I’m just delighted every time I look at it.

“I have not seen anyone yet who has looked at this bust and hasn’t been overwhelmed by how splendid it is. And the expression is so captivating. I think it’s a remarkable piece of art.”

After the bust was delivered, DeLaney was astonished when Weaver told him he considers himself primarily a painter. In fact, the bust was his first commissioned sculpture.

Nonetheless, Weaver’s earlier sculptures were instrumental in landing him the Chavis commission. Peter Grover, director of collections at W&L, was given the task of finding an artist.

“A colleague of mine, Pat Hobbs, director of the Lee Chapel, is also an artist,” Grover said. “I told Pat I’d been given an assignment to find a sculptor to do a bust of John Chavis and asked her if she knew anybody.

“She immediately said, ‘Oh, you’ve got to get Rick Weaver, he’s wonderful in sculpture.’ When Rick unveiled the bust for Ted and I, it was unbelievable.

“It sprang to life and has a real spirit about it. The bust brings life to the boardroom. It’s a first-class work of art, and we’re just thrilled from every which way.”

Weaver said, in one sense, it was the perfect commission, because there’s no known likeness of Chavis. There are a few line drawings or prints purported to be of Chavis, but these can’t be authenticated.

“I was pretty much given free rein in terms of the Chavis likeness,” said Weaver, who lives in Albemarle County with his wife, Tracy Davis, and their 3-year-old son, Max. “What I did for a couple of weeks was look for somebody with an interesting head when I was walking up and down the Downtown Mall.

“I was in CVS one day when I saw a guy with full cheekbones and very prominent features. I knew Chavis supposedly had Cherokee heritage, so I asked the man if he would be willing to pose for me.

“He was between jobs and had time to do it. He was a real interesting guy and it turned out he was born in a county in North Carolina very close to the county Chavis was supposedly born in.

“And he also had Cherokee heritage in his background. I thought that was interesting, considering I just picked him out during a walk on the mall. But I didn’t try to make a portrait of him, and if he was to stand next to the bust one wouldn’t think it was of him.”

Before beginning work on the bust, Weaver conferred with DeLaney and also read a book about Chavis written by Helen Chavis Othow to get a sense of the man. Then he used his imagination and the model’s face as a guide to create the likeness.

During a six-week period the model sat for Weaver once or twice a week. The artist said it’s always better to work from life than photographs.

“Photographs distort so much, even if you’re just taking a picture of the head,” said the 46-year-old artist. “Small spatial differences will be distorted in terms of the size or the form.

“A photograph also distorts values, so a lot of the darks go way too dark. Of course, you can do things to rectify that, but in terms of expression there are all kinds of surprises that happen when the person is in front of you.

“For me, one of the real joys is the connection you get with a living person. The person is always moving a little bit and the light is changing, so there’s kind of a fluidity to the experience you don’t get when you’re working from a photograph that’s a frozen moment.”

Weaver said he’s more or less a self-taught sculptor. His formal training in art concentrated on the painting medium, but he still has a strong interest in sculpture, and it’s something he constantly works on.

The path Weaver took to arrive at the decision to become a full-time artist was somewhat of a meandering route. His father, a career Army officer, had a lot of artistic ability and enjoyed drawing for his children.

Weaver said his parents always encouraged him when he drew, but there was never a teacher or mentor during his formative years who pushed him in an artistic direction.

“I remember very specifically a kid in the third grade who was just an incredible artist,” Weaver said. “I was not at all gifted like that.

“Whatever ability I’ve developed has been through doing it over a long period of time. And I’m not one of those people who knew I wanted to be an artist at the age of two, either.

“I’ve worked pretty hard. I’ve been studying art seriously since 1982. It’s something I love to do, so it’s easy to do it all the time. But it has taken me a long time to get to the level I’m at now, and it hasn’t come easy.”

When it came time for Weaver to go to college and prepare for a career, he studied economics and business at Vanderbilt University. After graduation, he started law school at the University of North Carolina.

Weaver realized that law wasn’t a profession for him. After working overseas for a year, he made the momentous decision to pursue a career in art.

“I don’t know if I can quite articulate or put my finger on why I went into art,” Weaver said, his eyes fixed on a large charcoal sketch of falling human figures taped to a wall. “But I knew after law school that life was too short to spend it doing something you didn’t enjoy.

“I knew I enjoyed drawing and painting, so I wanted to, at least, give it a chance and study with some good teachers and see if I continued to be interested in it. I was, so I kept doing it.

“I think being an artist is a great life, if money is not the most important thing to you. Not that you can’t make a living at it, but it’s tough if that’s what you’re after. I think the joy of being an artist comes from another area.

“Doing the work and pushing yourself and being excited about your development is where the pleasure is for me.”

Weaver received his artistic training while attending several studio schools in New York during a seven-year period. The first year he produced a few drawings that made him think there was something there worth developing.

One of the important lessons Weaver learned during his studio-school years had nothing to do with form, shading or technique. It had to do with the important roles hard work, dedication and persistence play in the development of an artist.

“I don’t know what a great artist is, but if you’re talking about technical skills, I think that’s something that’s available to everyone despite whatever initial talent level you begin with,” said Weaver, who teaches at the Art League School in Alexandria two days a week and also gives private lessons at his studio.

“When I was in art school, I saw that the people who got really good technically were the ones who wanted to do it and stuck with it and did it every day. I use the analogy of learning a foreign language with my students.

“Some people have more of an initial gift for languages. But that doesn’t mean if you don’t have the gift that you can’t learn how to speak Italian or French. If you really want to and you practice all the time, then you can learn it.”

Weaver said he’s at a point in his career where he has a need to push himself to see how good he can become as a painter. He has the confidence to believe that whatever problems he encounters while painting, if he sticks with it long enough, he can figure out what the answers are.

“Each level you hit in a painting opens up new levels to explore whether technically or conceptually,” Weaver said. “And that process of pushing yourself to those other levels is really interesting.

“I find it very satisfying to hit a certain place and see new openings where I can go next. It’s important to me that eventually a painting develops into some sort of idea that means something to me.

“And so at the end of the painting it’s still a little mysterious, but I have some idea of what that painting has become conceptually for me. I don’t expect the viewer to get that exactly, but I hope that I’ve been honest enough and sincere enough about my attempt through the painting that that sincerity or honesty will appear in some way.”

Although Weaver considers himself to be primarily a painter, he very much enjoys doing sculptures. He said he likes working with volume and space, which are things that only can be suggested with a painting.

“With paintings it’s this trick, an illusion,” Weaver said. “But with sculpture you’re actually making the thing.

“The feeling of creation is really heightened for me with sculpture because of that. And there’s something about its permanence.

“Something in bronze is here in this world. It’s solid and, for better or for worse, it’s going to survive unless someone melts it down.”

Whether Weaver is working on a painting or sculpture he’s on guard not to let himself drift into placid seas just because it’s an easy way to go. He said it’s critical for him to stay in touch with the emotion he started with and not allow ideas of how he’s done things before, or has seen before, take over.

“It’s very easy to do what’s known,” Weaver said. “You have to really be aware of false notes that can creep into a painting, because they’re easy or because they’re known or you’ve done them before.

“You have to weed those out and make sure you’re always pushing yourself to express exactly what you want.”

Weaver stands as an example of what can be accomplished when someone applies himself to a goal and is fueled by a love for what he does.

“For me art is a process of exploration,” Weaver said. “There’s moments when unexpected things happen that you never could have thought of consciously that are really exciting, and I don’t know where that comes from.

“For example, sometimes I’ll be working on a painting and leave to go somewhere. When I come back to it later it will almost be like someone else painted a certain spot and I wonder how I did that.

“It’s as if somebody better than me snuck into my studio and did it. Maybe its because I had to work so hard to get where I’ve gotten, and I plod along, that those moments become possible.”