In November 1963, when Briel was a junior, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Less than six months later his brother, U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, flew by helicopter to Hampden-Sydney College. Briel remembers Kennedy entering Johns Auditorium to muffled hisses and grumbling. Kennedy put aside his prepared remarks, took off his jacket, and said, “I think you boys have some questions.” He proceeded to take mostly hostile questions for 45 minutes. By the close, recalls Briel, the Attorney General had won over the crowd and received a long ovation. On the way back to the helicopter, Kennedy met Briel who presented to him a portrait of his brother, the former president. College President W. Taylor Reveley ’39 had used that portrait as bait to get Robert Kennedy on campus, and it had worked.

“I started off doing portraits of people I wanted in my life,” Briel says of the portrait of the 12-year old sister he never had. He continues creating images of people he thinks are missing from his life. The walls of his West Hollywood condominium are filled with canvases creating a surrogate family.

Briel says, “Portraiture displays an emotional connection with a person—the subject.” In the early 1990s he was commissioned to paint tennis great Arthur Ashe, someone Briel says was “a superb man.” During the sitting, Ashe was wearing a suit without the jacket and holding a tennis racket; they stopped to take a break and Ashe—in the late stages of AIDS—sat down and braced himself against his racket. It was in that brief moment that Ashe revealed to Briel his true self and Briel happened to see him. The artist took some pictures and Ashe left; he died a short time later, but Briel had caught the essence of the man. That portrait now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution.

That connection between the artist and the subject, however, creates an image that others may not recognize. One man had commissioned a portrait of his deceased father. Not having met the man, Briel used a collection of photographs to create the portrait, which was infused with Briel’s impression of the man coming only from the photographs. “When the son came to see how the portrait was progressing,” Briel recalls, “I was worried that he would think his father looked too mean. I was surprised when he said, ‘people might think he doesn’t look mean enough.’”

Briel believes that a painted portrait is a history of the relationship between the artist and his subject. This is why the son thought his father might not look mean enough and why Briel can so successfully capture the essence of a deceased child after long (and sometimes painful) conversations with grieving parents. “They will come in with photographs of their child and start crying; then I will start crying,” he explains. “The process is very emotional, but really a part of the healing process for the parents.”

Former Professor Emeritus Graves H. Thompson and Briel were very good friends, so it seems only appropriate that Dr. Thompson bought the first painting Briel ever sold. The two men met when Briel was a freshman (and only 16 years old, having skipped a grade); Briel had studied Latin in high school, and Dr. Thompson encouraged him to continue doing so at Hampden-Sydney, which Briel did, even pursuing it in graduate school. “One day in grad school I just thought to myself, ‘What I am doing?’” Briel says with a laugh. “I became a PhD dropout.” Nevertheless, in the mid-1970s he returned to Hampden-Sydney to teach Latin with his mentor, Dr. Thompson, and later joined the development office. In 1976 he saved $10,000 and left. “This is when I started my painting career.”

For a while, Briel studied under artist Morton Sacks (who had spent a semester at Hampden-Sydney as artist-in-residence, while painting the now-banished Bicentennial Murals for the library) and developed an affinity for the Pop Art style of Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselman, Mel Ramos, and later David Hockney. Briel recalls with a smile what Sacks taught him about drawing a person’s head: “Imagine a fly walking all over the face.” His work still relies on pure, intense colors, indicative of both the acrylic paints with which he works and the style of his idols; the background of his portraits is often monochromatic so as not to overshadow the subject.

Louis Briel ’66 with a work in progress at his studio in West Hollywood, California.

Briel’s career as a commissioned portrait artist blossomed in the 1980s with a studio on Richmond’s Cary Street. “It was a fun place,” he says. “There were lots of interesting people who lived and worked in the area who would stop by my studio to see what I was working on.” Some of them, like a blue-collar worker who often stopped by, ended up on canvas. Briel remembers the day. “I had only seen him in his work clothes and when he arrived he was wearing a coat and tie. He told me, ‘I want to look nice since this will probably be the only time I get my portrait painted.’”

Painting, says Briel, is hard work and he does not do it when he does not have to. Unlike some writers who try to produce a predetermined number of pages each day, Briel says he concentrates on projects, whether personal or commissions: “I don’t paint every day, just to paint.” The process of converting the art of painting into the business of painting is not in his nature. He explains, “You have to be very Machiavellian to be a successful portrait artist and a successful business person.” Despite downplaying the business aspect of his work, Briel has been successful. Painting Arthur Ashe had a huge effect on business. “After that portrait,” he says, “my business doubled … maybe tripled.”

Putting Richmond and his Virginia roots behind him, Briel has moved to West Hollywood, California, where he continues painting, but has also expanded his creative palette to include writing. He has finished a mystery novel (about a college fundraiser embroiled in a murder) and he is working on a memoir.

Some of Briel’s work hangs on the walls of Hampden-Sydney College, including portraits of Reggie Smith, Stokeley Fulton, and Ned Crawley. However, one portrait of a notable College figure is missing. Briel was commissioned to paint a portrait of the beloved Mrs. P.T. Atkinson. The portrait, which was a surprise to her, was revealed at a party in her honor. While she reportedly expressed gratitude and pleasure, Briel learned later she had had the portrait taken under cover of night to a field where it was axed and burned … frame and all.