Please click the link below to read about Richard L. Ott's extensive legal experience.
For lawyer and artist Richard Ott, Denver's history lives, breathes and continues to thrive in stories passed down through four generations.
RICHARD OTT'S SOUTH DENVER ROOTS STRETCH BACK TWO CENTURIES to when his great grandfather arrived in Colorado in the late 
1800s. Ott has followed his father's footsteps into the legal profession, but spends his down-time in court sketching the people around him, like a writer taking notes for a story. "I'm a captive while I'm waiting so I draw."
Sitting in his law office at 598 S. Gilpin, surrounded by his oil paintings of local landmarks and people, he describes the building's roots which - like everything else in Washington Park - are deeply entwined with his own. "This was a corner grocery store when my dad was growing up in the 1930s," he says. "Before that it was a farm, a dairy, a rental, and then a dairy again." When the owner, a friend of Ott's grandparents, retired in the '70s, Ott's father bought the property and converted it into his law office.
But the Ott family legacy reaches back two centuries to his great grandfather's arrival in the late 1800s. "George Ott was a carpenter from Bavaria who decided to come to Colorado because he liked the mountains, Denver was growing, and he figured he could get work here," Ott says. Through the German American Club he met his future bride, built the homestead at 369 S. Humboldt St., and fathered eight children before succumbing to pneumonia after falling off the old Alameda trolley. "My great grandmother didn't really speak much English and the kids grew up without a father, becoming bricklayers, masons and carpenters."
But his grandfather, blinded by childhood illness in one eye, became a caddy at the Denver Country Club, played pro golf, and eventually launched a downtown sporting goods store (Denver Golf & Tennis), and helped design the golf course at City Park. "A great story was he and his brother were designing a golf course in Hot Springs, Wyo. They bought a bulldozer and drove it from Denver (across open land) because there were no paved roads."
Another favorite tale? The time his grandfather saw the Wright brothers in Denver's Overland Park. "They were here raising funds, and like every kid in town, he went to see it. He always thought it was kind of neat that in his own lifetime he saw Orville Wright fly an airplane and Neil Armstrong walk on the moon." Ott's grandmother emigrated from Ireland, first to Denver and then to Victor, outside Cripple Creek, where her father worked as a miner. "My grandmother was very smart and capable but grew up with limited opportunities, so she went into the church to become a nun and a teacher in Chicago. Before taking her final vows my great grandfather developed black lung; she returned to their Denver home to care for him. A priest from St. Francis introduced her to my grandfather."
His mother's father attended law school at DU and became a Denver juvenile court judge. "He actually believed in reform school, which was a very novel idea at the time. It meant putting black kids, Hispanic kids and white kids in class together - a huge issue - something he was constantly attacked for. My dad inherited his practice just out of law school after my grandfather died of cancer. Trying to survive; he'd go though files and find a ten-dollar bill here and a twenty-dollar bill there to carry him through."
Ott attended Christ the King elementary, Regis High and CU-Boulder before dropping out to see the world and find his true calling. "I went to the South Pacific and the Australian Outback. In New Zealand I saw some Rembrandt drawings that really inspired me. I had thought I wanted to be a writer, but the illustrations started taking over." He returned to CU where he studied psychology and began adding fine arts classes, subsequently studied at the Art Students League of New York, finished his undergraduate degree, and earned a degree in art and art therapy from the Pratt Institute. Back in Denver, he worked at Porter Hospital on the psych ward for eight years and while there enrolled in law school. "I realized to really make a living as a therapist you needed a doctorate and that would take another five years. So I thought: law school - three years and you're in and out."
Meanwhile, still painting, he co-founded Denver's nonprofit Art Students League along with artist Phil Levine. They pulled together a board including Henry Meininger of Denver's Meininger Fine Art Supplies and several prominent artists. "In 1986 we opened our doors and I started law school, which was pure madness. I was working full time at the hospital, running this art school, painting, and going to law school. My theory was, I'd known lawyers all my life and figured if they can do it, anybody can." He laughs. "But I struggled that first year because I took the admonition of my professors seriously that I had to read everything. When I instead started studying for the tests from the first day of class, I ended up getting straight A's my second and third year."
After passing the bar, he became a district attorney in Adams County where he worked for several years before joining his father's law practice after his dad's heart attack. The Art Students League continued to grow. "It was an immediate success. We had good teachers, Henry Meininger's involvement mattered, and all our classes sold out from the beginning. We were renting two unfurnished office spaces at 15th & Platte, and later, 19th & Market. But people from the suburbs wouldn't park down there back then. So we shopped around and struck a deal with Denver Public Schools for the (current) space at 2nd and Grant (the historic Sherman School). Seven-hundred-fifty students a month go through there, and I think it's one of the most productive things I've done."
Ott joined the board of the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District (SCFD) from its start in the mid 1990s and later became chairman. "We reviewed some three-hundred different arts, cultural, and science nonprofits and distributed millions. We wanted to make sure the organizations remained healthy and could use the money properly, so they would be around year after year. I personally think it has a lot to do with why there are so many successful small theatre companies in Denver today. All these nonprofits have really invigorated the city's cultural life; it was a brilliant idea." He serves on Denver's Parks Rec Advisory Board and on the board of the James Beckwourth Foundation/Beckwourth Outdoors, a Denver-based nonprofit providing outdoor activities for kids and adults and educating the public about contributions made by people of color. He also serves on the board of Denver County Court and Colorado Bar Association. Ott continues to consult with nonprofits while the bulk of his law practice remains criminal defense, a branch of law that suits his temperament. "I like it much more than prosecuting. It allows me to be more creative and I can pick and choose my clients."
And he paints every day. He spends his down-time in court sketching the people around him, like a writer taking notes for a story. "I'm a captive while I'm waiting so I draw. Sometimes it's just whoever crosses my field of vision but sometimes I'll sketch people around me deliberately, to use later in a constructed oil painting. All my constructed paintings are really about communication and are very abstract in the sense that there isn't really a center of interest; I want you to look equally at everybody." He often sketches at Kaladi Bros. Coffee and his prolific work adorns the walls of other local coffee shops and galleries.
"It took me a while to figure out how I could mesh practicing law with being an artist, and then I realized that these people I was painting are my law practice. Plus, when I'm in court and trying a case it's like painting, because I'm utterly focused on what I'm doing. I'm there doing only that, paying attention to how things are balancing and what feels right and what doesn't. It's complete concentration in the moment. I like that a lot."
-Washington Park Profile, written by Susan Dugan