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.