Theory of the Leasure Class

The “Theory of the Leisure Class,” is the title of a book written by a sociologist named Thorstein Veblen. I’m not going to attempt to summarize the book in any way. I tried to read it on more than one occasion but was never able to finish it. Perhaps I felt that it was a series of very cogent observations which would lead me to the conclusion the my life and work was all a complete waste of time.

At one point in the book he talks about architecture, here is what he has to say in 1899:

“The endless variety of fronts presented by the better
class of tenements and apartment houses in our cities is an
endless variety of architectural distress with a suggestion
of expensive discomfort. Considered as objects of beauty, the
dead walls of the sides and back of these structures, left
untouched by the hands of the artists, are commonly the best
feature of the building.”

This is very radical thinking for 1899, and the history of architecture from then until now looks as though it has strained every nerve just to please Mr. Veblen. But personally I think that such thinking leads to the Stalinist style of architecture we can see, throughout the world, starting in the thirties, and ending in the late seventies.

But I love the fact that he contrasts the fronts and sides of buildings in his writing, and it is true that in the architecture of his time the buildings exhibited these two radically different sensibilities. The fronts are ornate and decorative, and the backs and sides are utilitarian and devoid of decoration. I often develop the same observation in my drawings and this one is a very good example.

This drawing measures 5.75” x 8.”. It is drawn on gessoed cold press watercolor paper with a black wax pencil, with highlights put in with white paint and a brush.

The Road to California

Artists do not often describe the procedures that they use to do a painting or drawing. One of the reasons is that if you attempted to keep a record of each mechanical step involved, the directions and explanations would become so long and convoluted that you couldn’t read it. It would be like a person who decides to keep a journal, or record of each breath that they took, a catalog with dates and times and comments. One could start such a journal but within three minutes it would be obsolete.

The same happens if you write down the steps of a painting, you can put down three or four steps and then the process becomes so quick and complex that you loose track of everything.

Sometimes you come across individual comments by other artists about there procedures however, which can be very useful. Leonardo said that if you wanted to do a landscape painting you should begin by throwing a sponge at a wall and observing the pattern that it makes. Andrew Wyeth, in one of the books about him is quoted as saying that he begins large paintings by simply throwing paint at the surface of the canvas for a long time until an elaborate pattern of splotches and dots is built up.

I have been influenced by both of these comments. I often go all over the surface of my work with a sponge in order to set up a landscape like pattern to begin, and I repeatedly throw paint and splatter the surface before I begin to paint to give myself ideas and to find the forms of the drawing in my mind’s eye projected on to an abstract surface.

But all steps excluded, there is no substitute to knowing how to draw, and this is an example of an effortless virtuoso drawing.

The subject is the Mass. Turnpike looking West from an overpass at West Stockbridge. This work is done from memory, but anyone who knows the spot will recognize it. There is a view seen from an overpass where the two sides of the turnpike separate to go round a little mountain, where also a North, South road cuts across the scene. It is a scene that gives one a feeling of great magnitude and you can’t help thinking, “This road goes to California.”

This drawing measures 7.125” x 10.75”. It is painted on tinted cold press watercolor paper with a acrylic paint . It is signed on the front with an R and on the back there is a full signature and the date, Richard Britell , August 19, 2001.

Some Color Theory

Color Theory

Here is some color theory, it may come in useful if you have to pick out some wallpaper, or express an opinion about the fabrics in someone’s living room.


The colors of the color wheel consist of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet, usually named in that order and arranged in a circle. This list of colors alternates between primaries, and secondaries. The primaries cannot be mixed, and the secondaries are composed of there adjacent primaries.


Red is referred to as the “compliment” of Green. Blue is the “complement” of Orange, and Yellow is the “compliment” of Violet. What, do you suppose is meant by the term compliment?

You might just assume that it means “Looks good with” as in, “that hat compliments your scarf.” But it is more complicated than that.

A compliment is an amount that makes up a total as in “These ten men complete the compliment of the band” in other words it means, to make up the difference. If you consider the colors and their compliments, each set is a combination of one primary and one secondary color. Take for example Red and Green. Red is a primary and green is a secondary, made up of blue and yellow. Therefore Red, combined with its secondary equals the three primaries because Green is actually Yellow and Blue.

The point here is that each combination of a color with its complement is actually the whole spectrum because all possible colors get represented in the combination. So it is true that these colors complement each other and bring each other to life.

Furthermore you don't even need to have the second color to get the complementary effect since the eye produces an after image of the complementary color when ever we look at a color. It is a scientific fact that the longer you look at yellow the more violet your eye sees. Just pull down a white shade over a window on a bright day, the shade will be a glowing yellow color. Look right at it for about a minute, and then close your eyes, and cover them with your hands. In that darkness you will see a purple violet rectangle, the after image of the yellow you saw with your eyes open. It was there also when your eyes were open, and if you would notice, you would see its edge bordering the yellow, when ever your eyes readjust.

It is interesting to study that color patch that you see with your eyes closed. It will gradually change, from the outside border, in, and runb through the entire spectrum, as the cones in your retna vibrate at slower frequencies. Those colors in your eyes are called "phosphines"

Cathedral Interior

This is the second in a series of architectural drawings. It is an extremely complicated drawing in all respects and there are a great many approaches I could take to discussing it. I could talk about its tonal range, and aspects of light and shading. I could talk about the relationship of expressionism to classicism, and where this drawing does or doesn’t fit in. I could talk about Freudian, or sexual symbolism in the drawing, this wouldn’t be hard considering all of the groin vaults right in the middle of the picture. But all those topics are going to have to wait until I have finished with the topic of perspective.

This drawing presents one of the most difficult perspective problems an artist must deal with, the problem of drawing big circles, or ellipses in succession. Not only are there numerous big arches but there are sets of them slowly decreasing in size and blocking each other out.

In classical perspective theory there is a procedure for drawing circles and ellipses. First you draw the square that the circle fits into. You draw this square in perspective and this automatically gives you four points of the ellipse, the points where the circle is tangent to the square. Then you draw a series of about twenty crossing and intersecting lines through the square in perspective, too complicated to explain here, and this will give you a number of additional points on the ellipse. With all these points as a guide you draw the ellipse. This never works, however, because all the thousands of guide lines make your drawing look like a dish of sauerkraut rather than a drawing.

I have utilized the above method many times but even with all those points as a guide one always ends up relying on one’s eye and the natural tendency of the wrist and hand to draw an ellipse naturally. Artists always end up drawing these troublesome shapes freehand, you simply rest your wrist in the proper relationship to the curve being drawn and then rotate your hand back and forth. If your line comes out a little off, you let the shadows gobble up the mistakes.

You may want to ask me, “That's fine, with that method a left handed person can draw the right side of an ellipse, but what about the other side of the shape where the fingers have to contract?” This is an extremely good and important question and I’m glad you asked it. From the time of the cave paintings until the Renaissance perspective was unknown, its discovery solved many problems artists face. The problem of how to draw the opposite, or inner side of an ellipse was discovered in the late eighteenth century, and consists of turning the paper upside down.

I Went To Art School

I went to Art School. Here is my history. I was two years at Pratt Institute, two years at Syracuse University, and two years at the University of Massachusetts. After I got out with my masters degree I knew next to nothing.

I majored in printmaking for my masters degree. When I was finished with school I took all my best etchings and lithographs and woodcuts to the only gallery in my town and showed them to the director. It was my first such experience. The director looked through all my prints and separated them into two piles. When he was done he said, “I like these, and I don’t like those, indicating the two piles.” Then he added “If you have anymore of these I would like to see them.” He was referring to an old piece of cardboard in the bottom of my portfolio box that had been used for a few years to roll out the ink roller in the print room. It was simply an old piece of cardboard with a collection of random streaks of ink on it.

This was a confusing experience for me because a gallery director preferred an accidental accumulation of ink to my accumulated six years of art knowledge. The most difficult aspect was that I had to agree with him.

All this has next to nothing to do with my drawing, but I bet this drawing could easily stand it’s own against that piece of cardboard, but on the other hand it has that accidentalness built into it, without which things look lifeless and academic.

A Window Downtown

Almost every day I find a reason to go down to the large hardware store in our town and on the way I pass this large brick tenement building of four stories and in one of the upper windows there is a row of potted flowers. I have been meaning to do a drawing of a row of windows on the top floor of this building but first I drew this detail of the window with the flowers.

Almost all the drawings I have posted have been done with various sorts of pencils, but this is one of those drawings which has been done with the brush. When you draw the leaf of a plant with a pencil, first the pencil point runs down one side of the leaf, then the other side. After that you might go back and shade in the shape. When you draw the leaf of a plant with a brush, the left side if the bristles draws the one side of the leaf, and the right side of the bristles draws the other side, meanwhile as you make the stroke the tip fills in the middle, and a kind of tremor of the fingers variegates and details the shaded part. All this can be seen in the stroke of the brush if you take a careful look.

Some people will say to me, “You know Richard, the detail is better than the whole drawing!” To which I can only reply, that’s probably why I just drew the window and not the whole building.