Old Town Without Spectacles

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Spectacles in this case does not refer to dramatic events but to eyeglasses. Eyeglasses were invented during the Renaissance as a result of the invention of the lens, and the telescope. It was the invention of the lens than finally allowed artists and scientists to understand and explain the system of perspective because with a lens you can cast an image of a scene onto a wall or a piece of paper.

Once the system of perspective was understood all paintings and drawings from that point on show its influence, Looking through an art history book it in easy to find the dividing line somewhere in the fifteenth century, after which everything changes from fantasy, magic, and spatial confusion, to a kind of mathematical, logical order.

Many of the drawing that I do employ perspective and often in my descriptions I will explain certain aspects of that system, but oddly enough like many people, when I look at pictures in museums I am always most drawn to those works created before perspective was invented. It is as if the artist, unhampered by any rigid system, follows only their intuition and imagination. Granted, the towns they paint always look like an earthquake is going on, but to my mind, charm and naivete completely make up for the lack of mathematics.
So here is my town, drawn without the use of perspective. A lot is going on here, and I can’t explain everything, but just one thing. At the bottom right there is a ladder leaning up against the wall. This ladder belongs to a mason who has started to repair a crack in the topmost stone of the wall. It is first thing in the morning and having set everything up to work, he doesn’t start working, but goes off to have a cup of coffee instead. I can understand this because I do the same thing myself all the time . You can see him on the porch there just to the left of the wall and the ladder.

This mason showed me a very interesting thing. Can you see the little square like a bandage on the crack in the stone just to the left of the ladder. That is a little piece of glass, cemented across a crack in the stone. He places it there because if the glass breaks over time, then he will know that the crack is getting worse. But if the glass doesn’t crack it means that he doesn’t need to fix it. It is like the expression, “If it’s not broken don’t fix it.” But in this case it would be, “If it’s not getting worse don’t fix it."

Oh, and by the way, since it is first thing in the morning and the light is coming from the left, then we must be looking toward the south, that’s right isn’t it?

Dimensions: 8.5” x 11.25”
Materials: 2b pencil on buff colored paper, fixed
Signature: Along the bottom edge: Richard Paul Britell , April 4, 2002

Tragic Love, Jane Russell

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The first woman I was ever truly in love with was Jane Russell. This was a love both tragic, and confusing for me. It was especially confusing as I was a child at the time and I had absolutely no idea that I had fallen in love with her. It came about unconsciously, just like an illness with an incubation period.

Apparently, when I was young, I don’t even know what age, I saw one of her films by accident . Perhaps it was showing along with one of the westerns I would go to see back then. I can remember that there were two feature films showing together, and because of the Jane Russell film I sat through both movies twice.

I soon forgot all about those movies, but several weeks later I had a vivid dream about Ms. Russell. I can’t remember any details of that dream except that we were in love and then she rejected me for someone else.

For many days, even weeks after that dream I was terribly depressed. It was exactly as if it had actually happened, as if it was my own real life experience. This so upset me that I actually began to argue with, and ridicule myself. “Richard,” I would say, in a tone of indignant reproach, “You’re only nine years old and she has got to be at least twenty. Besides you’ve never even met her, never ever really seen her. I mean you’ve seen her image but that’s just some dots of ink on some paper in a magazine. It would be one thing to fall in love with a movie star, very understandable to suffer the pangs of unrequited love in that situation. But to suffer from rejection? Well, this is just idiotic!” But I discovered at an early age that no amount of verbal logic or reasoning has any power over one’s emotional life. It just roars along under its own steam, and you just wait until it is over.

The Power of Music (1)

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Anton Dvorak

My introduction to music began in a very novel way. My father was an avid fan of barbershop harmony and he had a desire to sing in harmony with his children. I had an older brother and a younger sister, and when the three of us were between five and nine years old he had us memorize our parts to music individually, after that we would practice singing our parts with our fingers in our ears, and finally we would sing a piece all together in harmony with my father filling in the bass. This part singing was an integral feature of our everyday life and as such I never gave much thought to the uniqueness of the experience.

This musical training ended abruptly when I was thirteen, as my father died. Being in junior high school and without a father I began to act out in school and was frequently disciplined and at times I was in danger of failing.

At this time I had another remarkable musical experience. In school there were often school assemblies and they began with the entire school body standing up and singing the “Star Spangled Banner.” No one actually sang however, but we just stood there mumbling something to pass the time while the music teacher played the piano. Invariably, after this, the principal would admonish us for not singing and for having no school spirit. No one however paid the slightest attention to any of this except one boy in a grade one higher than myself. He was an older boy, and an inveterate trouble maker. He had failed more than one grade, and was reputed to be in trouble with the police. He was tall, awkward and over weight. One day during the singing of the “Star Spangled Banner,” he began to sing loudly with a good rich baritone voice. As no one else was really singing his voice could be heard above every thing else, and as he began to sense that we were becoming his audience, he began to sing louder and even more fully. As he began to sing the second stanza, elements of pathos and passion appeared in his voice and by the time he reached the end of the song his voice had attained a level of great emotional force and volume. The auditorium gave to his singing the additional acoustics and amplification of a music hall, and the fact that he was in many ways still a child gave to the power of his singing a naive innocence completely at odds with his reputation and actual character. He was doing this simply and obviously to be bad, and for no other reason, and yet he succeeded in an unexpected way in that we were moved to a feeling of intensely emotional patriotism, and at the same instant we understood that he was a boy of great talent who was being slowly crucified by circumstance! I began to understand the power of music.

Dimensions:9.25” X 6.5”
Materials: Black wax pencil on painted and prepared watercolor paper
Signature: In the bottom border: Richard Britell, January, 3, 2002

The Power of Music (2)

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Billie Holiday

My description of the boy who sang the “Star Spangled Banner,” as loudly as he could in the auditorium was written from an adults retrospective point of view. Looking back on it I now understand it as an artistic, cultural experience. But it happened when I was thirteen and at the time I was only fired with a desire to do something similar. I looked for an opportunity to do what I was told, to obey the rules to such an extent and in such a way that it would become a disruptive event and gain everyone’s attention. Soon fate provided me with an opportunity.

Our good natured and long suffering music teacher who had been instructing us twice a week for seven long years got it into her head that we should learn to sing Negro Spirituals. She divided our class up into sopranos, altos, tenors and basses, and gave us all parts to memorize. There were no real basses, just three boys including myself whose voices were adult enough to manage a simple bass line. It was very naive on the music teachers part to expect us to sing Negro Spirituals in part harmony. She had never succeeded in simply getting us to sing in unison in all the years we had been taking instruction from her. In the entire first session with the spirituals we didn’t produce enough sound to drown out the ceiling fan.

I had one and only one friend at that time, a black boy named Clarence. Clarence, like myself, was always in trouble and constantly being punished. On the way home that afternoon I asked him,”Clarence, can you sing a bass part.”
“Yes,” he replied. I actually didn’t believe him and I asked, “How do you know?”
“I sing the bass line in the hymns in church every Sunday.” he explained.
“Ok,” I said, “I can sing a bass line too, because my father taught me. Next week during music lets sing the s---- out of these spirituals.”

The next music session began with the song “Over Jordan.” We didn’t begin to really sing at first, a mixture of timidity and fear held us back, but as the song moved along the sound of each others voices gave us encouragement, and very soon we were singing as powerfully as it is humanly possible for thirteen year old boys to sing. The rest of the room fell completely silent listening to our bass duet and when we got to the end I was so elated that I felt like I was in a drunken stupor. I had never experienced anything like this in my life. The deepest meaning and the darkest side of the music had dawned on me. We were singing with all our might, about suffering and about death.

Dimensions: 7” x 6”
Materials: Charcoal pencil on painted watercolor paper
Signature: Along the bottom border: Richard Britell, January 5, 2002

The Man Who Climbed Stairs

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(Smith College, Northampton, Mass.)


For several years I had the good fortune to live in Northampton Ma. next to Smith College and across the street from Forbes Library. At that time the State Hospital for mental patients was in full operation in Northampton, and so, every day on Main Street mixed in with the college professors and upscale college students one saw numerous mental patients out on day passes, noticeable by their second hand clothing, smoking habits, and tendency to engage strangers in personal conversations apropos of nothing.

These characters were a regular part of Northampton and with time the students came to know, and even to care about their lives and struggles. One patient, an older man, would arrive at the Public Library each day in the late morning and once there he would embark on a project which consisted of climbing the stairs to the second floor stacks. At that time in the morning there might be perhaps a dozen individuals in the reading room working on various projects. One person would be following his investments in journals, another would be working on a doctorate, and another on their masters degree, but this man from the hospital was there for one and only one reason, to climb the stairs to the second floor stacks, which he was unable to do.

In between attempts to climb the stairs he would rest in the reading room, sitting sideways in a chair with his eyes fixed on the object of his struggle. Then abruptly, with a sigh, he would walk off to the stairs, take a grip on the hand rail, and start to climb. At the halfway point he would stop, and come back down backwards. Sometimes he would rush up the stairs almost by twos, but he never could get closer than two steps from the top before he would have to stop and come back down again.

He worked at this project single mindedly for several hours each day . Magazines, books and newspapers held no interest for him, and he spent the time in between attempts, simply staring at the objects that perplexed him. This struggle went on for over a year, and then one day, with no one noticing, he got up to the second floor.

Imagine just for a moment watching someone climb a flight of stairs and succeed, after failing to do so for more than a year.

But he was not the sort of man who would rest on his laurels..........

Occasionally people will ask me what connection there is between my drawings and the texts that I write. Sometimes there is almost none, and certainly they are never illustrations. In this case the drawing is of some buildings at Smith College and the landscape that the man passed every day on his way to and from the library. I passed that way also, and so it made me think about him.

Dimensions: 8” x 10.25”
Materials: Wax pencil on prepared paper
Signature: Across the bottom: Richard Britell, August 19, 2002

The Man Who Climbed Stairs, (2)

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(Northampton Skyline)

There has always been an outdoor cafe of one kind or another near the corner of Masonic and Main Streets in Northampton. The man who had finally mastered the stairs of the library would often go into that cafe, order a glass of water, and then sit for an hour or two at a table outside, resting from his labors. But his restless spirit needed a new challenge and the summer after his triumph at the library he appeared at the cafe with a bicycle. He didn’t ride the bicycle to the cafe, he walked to town next to it, guiding it with one hand by the seat, and the other by the handle grip. Periodically, on his journey from the Hospital to the town, he would attempt to mount the bicycle, coast uncertainly for a few yards with one foot on the pedal and the other wavering in circles in the air. Then he would jump off and resume walking. At the cafe he would sit drinking his water staring fixedly at the bike locked securely to a pole just four feet from his face. He would even interrupt his enjoyment of his water to unlock the bike and attempt to ride it.

Needless to say this man’s struggles now became a matter of public notice. The clientele of the cafe were regulars and so they became witnesses to this old crazy man's repeated attempts to ride the bicycle. At first it was really impossible not to laugh at him, but after many weeks and months it became obvious that he brought more dedication and single mindedness of purpose to his task, than we did to ours, what ever ours might have been. He was like a monk or an ascetic, while we were just lay people without any real convictions or ambitions.

As that summer drew to a close, one day, inevitably, he got himself onto the seat of the bicycle, began to pedal, and drove off wavering down the sidewalk. Involuntarily we got to our feet and began to cheer for him. Word spread quickly inside the cafe, and people came rushing out hoping to catch a glimpse of him in the distance. Everyone was cheering and clapping, and I couldn’t help but notice that some people had unexpected tears in their eyes.

That was many years ago. There is still a cafe at the corner of Masonic and Main Streets, but the Northampto State Mental Hospital is closed, and the Library has been remodeled. Where the stairs to the stacks were there is now an office. By now the man who climbed the stairs has gone on to meet his maker, where, if there is recognition for diligence and determination, I am sure he takes his place in front of many an illustrious personage.

Dimensions: 7.5” x 10.75”
Materials: Terra Cotta wax pencil on painted and prepared paper. The dints and textures are intentional
Signature: Across the bottom, Richard Britell, August 20, 2002

Woman's Head

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This is a very subtle drawing and there are a great many things I could say about it, but I am going to confine myself to talking about aspects of the technique of the drawing. To begin the drawing I tinted a piece of watercolor paper with a series of washes of terra cotta color. I brought the paper to a certain tint such that when I started to draw with a terra cotta pencil the lightest tones would not show up at all since they would be identical in color to the paper itself. This gave me the ability to bring up the tones and shadows gradually out of the color of the paper, which allows for great control of the tonality of the drawing.

The same is true for the white highlights, some of them are the undisturbed tint of the paper such as the right side of the nose, and some are white chalk which rises out of the color of the paper in such a way that you cannot see the softer strokes at all.

Another subtility of the drawing is the actual paper surface. The surface isn’t exactly paper at all. I filled the paper with acrylic filler, and while it was drying I sprinkled it with fine brick dust and pressed it into the surface. The drawing is of a piece of sculpture, and this surface very beautifully indicates that aspect of marble where the sculptor has brought the surface to perfection and yet the stone must insist on it’s own identity by revealing its little fissures and dents. This, to my eye, is not a fault at all but one of the most beautiful aspects of the surface of sculpture.

Dimensions: 8.3” x 5.25”
Materials: Terra cotta wax pencil on prepared paper
Signature: Bottom edge, Richard Britell, Dec.7, 2001

Virginia Woolf, and Dostoevsky

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This text is a continuation of the text for the Dostoevsky portrait that I posted yesterday. And what does Virginia Woolf have to do with Dostoevsky? Nothing that I am aware of, but the text for the Dostoevsky drawing talks about how he must have been influenced by the photographs he saw during his lifetime, since photography was just beginning in the middle to late 19th century. I gave several examples of Dostoevsky’s writing that I thought illustrated a kind of photographic perception. Later I remembered that there is a passage in “The Idiot,” in which Dostoevsky actually has his principal character describe a photograph.

Below is the passage, the character is Prince Mishkin and he is describing a photograph of a woman whom he will later fall in love with.


“It is a wonderful face, and I feel sure that her destiny is
not an ordinary one. Her face is smiling enough, but she
must have suffered terribly - hasn't she? Her eyes show
it- those two bones there, the little points under her eyes,
just where the cheek begins. It’s a proud face too, terribly
proud. And I can’t say whether she is good and kind or not.”
“And would you marry a woman like that?”
“I cannot marry at all, I am an invalid”


And what has this to do with Virginia Woolf? Descriptions in literature can never hope to create a truly specific image, instead we think of some image that we know, that the text reminds us of. This text from “The Idiot,” makes me think of this archetypical image of Virginia Woolf.

"Virginia Woolf" Richard Britell, painting, oil on canvas, 8.5" x 6" 2003
Location: Britell Studio , Pittsfield, MA
Price: $1200.00

Dostoevsky

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This portrait of Dostoevsky was done from one of the few photographs made of him during his lifetime. Photography was just beginning when Dostoevsky was writing and I happen to think that he was influenced by the photographs he saw. Either he was affected by photographs or he was driven by the same desire to record the peculiar idiosyncratic detail of everyday life. Before photographs drawing and painting never attempted to record fleeting but highly individualised detail.
Dostoevsky wasn’t the first writer to do this however, his predecessors were equally keen observers. Take this example from Gogol’s “The Overcoat.”

“Petrovich reached for his round snuffbox, exactly which one is hard to say, as someone had poked his finger through the place where the face should have been and it was pasted over with a square piece of paper.” (Incidentally, that image is a metaphor for Russian society, the Russian Revolution, and the subsequent communist society.)

Or this example from Pushkin’s “Egyptian Nights.”

“He wore a black frock coat already greying at the seams, and a pair of summer trousers although it was well into autumn, a fake diamond glittered on his yellow shirt front...”

But Dostoevsky brings this kind of observation to an entirely different level, both in terms of precision, and in terms of meaning, suggestion, and metaphor. Take for example this passage from “Crime And Punishment.”

“He wore an old completely ragged black frock coat, which had shed all its buttons. Only one somehow still hung on, and this one he kept buttoned, obviously not wishing to shirk convention.”

Or this example from “The Brothers Karamazov.”

“This gentleman wore a thin topcoat, stained and patched. His trousers were of a light checked material such as no one wore anymore,and they were so crumpled below the knees that they didn’t reach his shoes, so it looked as though he had outgrown them, like a growing boy”

Sometimes his descriptions go beyond photography and seem to set a stage for cinema, such as this passage from “The Devils.”

“As for the Captain himself, he slept on the floor, without bothering to undress. Crumbs, dirt, and wet puddles were everywhere; a large soaking wet floor-cloth lay in the middle of the first room, together with an old, worn out shoe in the same puddle.”

And sometimes Dostoevsky brings literature beyond even cinema in his ability to describe an event in such a way that its visual image can never be forgotten, as in this example from “House of the Dead.”

“I asked Katya if she remembered her teacher. She looked at me without a word, turned her face to the wall and burst into tears.” (from the introduction)

Painting, oil on paper 1993, Richard Britell 6.5" x 6"
Collection of Julia Britell

Where Did I get This Shirt

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When I was thirteen I talked my best friend into going camping with me in the Adirondacks. We lived in Utica, New York, and the intended destination was a resort town called Old Forge. Early on a Saturday morning we set off with our packs, on bicycles, for this destination which was sixty miles distant.

We were not prepared for the fact that we were pedaling into the mountains and the trip turned out to be uphill all day long. We arrived in the late afternoon, rented a canoe, and paddled to a place called Alger Island, an island for camping accessible only by boat. As soon as we were out of the canoe and on the island we laid down in a lean-to, more dead than alive, and fell absolutely sound asleep.

I was the first to wake up, and since my friend was still sleeping and the sun had not set, I went out in the canoe by myself for a short while. No sooner did I get a little way out from the shore than a huge storm began, with fierce gusts if wind and hail. This storm blew me out into the middle of the lake and then blew me right out of the canoe. There was a terrible moment in the water when I realized that the canoe was still upright and blowing away but since it was two thirds full of water I managed to catch up to it. Once back in the canoe the storm, as if with a mind of its own, proceeded to blow me to the further shore. Once the canoe was beached I tipped it over, crawled under it to get out of the rain and hail and then just lay there grateful to be alive.

There was a knock on the canoe, someone looked under the edge and said, “Would you like some Pancakes?” I was ship wrecked on the beach of a camp, and the owners took me in, gave me a change of dry clothes, and explained that they had watched me capsize from their porch, and were just about to come after me when I got back into the canoe.

When we were finished with a dinner of pancakes the storm ended, the setting sun came out from behind clouds, and I thanked them and headed out in the canoe, for the island The water was now calm and still, and orange in the light of the setting sun.

Back at the lean-to my friend was still sound asleep having slept through the storm. I woke him up and told him the whole story. He refused to believe any part of it. I said, “Well then, where did I get this shirt?

This entire little painting on heavy weight paper is carried out very expressionistically, but in the bottom can be found a tent, an overturned boat, a dock with a canoe next to it, one of those pine logs on the ground with all those short little broken off branches, a lake, some mountains, and light trying to shine through the clouds of an overcast sky. A lot of the texture is three dimensional in nature and comes from the paper itself, the surface is waxed and polished with a rag giving it an interesting finish which doesn’t show up in a scan.

This drawing measures 5.25” x 8.5”. It is painted on gessoed and tinted watercolor paper with a acrylic washes of paint. It is signed and dated on the back, Richard Britell, October 7, 2001.

Greyhound

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There is a collection of drawings in four volumes the title of which is “Great Drawings of All Times,” selected and edited by Ira Moskowitz. The volumes are large and all the reproductions are in full color. These books were published in 1962 and I have never seen anything anywhere better than this collection.
For many years I have looked at the drawings in those books and they presented certain almost insolvable problems. The thing that puzzled me the most was this: I would look at a drawing, and I would see that it was full of the most glaring errors that drawings are prone to, incorrect proportions, confused unfinished shapes, accidentally silly facial expressions, and yet when taken as a whole the drawings, despite there problems, appeared somehow perfect.

Once, in an attempt to figure this out, I copied a number of the drawings. In most cases the drawings were on medium to dark colors of paper, and the drawings were done in colors just somewhat darker than the paper itself. Suddenly everything became clear to me, it was the color of the paper, and the colors of the drawing materials that were beautiful, and not the chosen subject matter, and furthermore when drawings have such subtle tints placed on a tinted ground the figure and the ground merge together just like smoke, and “mistakes” have no visual meaning.

So I came to this conclusion, a maroon wash of ink on a dusty pink piece of paper was beautiful in its own right, and the subject added yet something more to a wonderful combination. This drawing of mine is a good example of this effect.

This drawing measures 7” x 6.5”. It is drawn on painted and tinted watercolor paper with a red wax pencil. There are some highlights in the drawing which were put in by scratching through the ground with a razor blade. It is signed and dated across the bottom, Richard Britell, October 6, 2001.

History of Doors and Windows part 2

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The basic shapes of the brick and stone work above windows and doors in masonry buildings remained unchanged in most respects for thousands of years. An arch of bricks above a window, or the appearance of a big single stone over a door or window opening is much the same in buildings built in 1880 as in buildings built in Roman times. At the end of the Nineteenth Century however builders introduced iron and steel into the construction of buildings, and from that point on tall buildings were supported by a steel structure, and the brick and stone facing became partly decorative, and partly a protection from the elements. Window and door openings no longer needed keystone arches or single lintel stones, because the steel was all the structure that was necessary. At that point however the brick and stone work remained the same stylistically, probably from the force of habit, for about twenty years. As the modern era began, the structural stone work, which had become ornamental, slowly began to disappear.

In this drawing the building on the far left was built as the styles were changing, the forms are basically like an old stone building, but if you look carefully you will see that the brick work above the windows is different. The bricks are set in vertically all in a row, with no arch or keystone. Setting the bricks on edge was lip service to the old decorative brick work, but when you see bricks above a window all set in a row like that, it means that they rest on a steel I beam, if they didn’t rest on an I beam then that part of the wall would collapse. The two buildings in the middle were built in the fifties so we will pass over them in silence. Behind those two middle buildings there is the cement wall of a concrete and steel building built in the Seventies. That building in the background there, is a perfect surface for graffiti. Fortunately the building on the right casts its shadow over the graffiti so that it is not too bothersome.

You may want to ask, “How did the graffiti artists manage to paint so high up on the wall?” The answer is that there is a ladder laying on the roof, you can see it there in the drawing. And what is that big masonry arch doing in the side wall of the building built in the fifties that I was going to pass over in silence? It is the remaining wall of a building that burned down in 1950, which had stood on that spot since 1895, and was incorporated into the building built in the fifties. You can still see the marks in the cement work on the side of the building on the left where the old building once met the wall of the outer building.

The building on the far right is the oldest building in this drawing, it was built in 1868. You can tell that it was built in 1868 because it says so in the arch over the second floor. The same group of Italian stone masons built the 1868 building, and the building that burned down, you can tell by the style of an arch over three windows which was one of their trademarks.

You may want to look at the doors and windows in the buildings of your town and compare their styles to the occasional date stones on the buildings and see just how accurate a dating method this is for American buildings of the 19th and 20th Centuries.

This drawing measures 5.125” x 8.5”. It is drawn on gessoed and tinted cold press watercolor paper with a maroon wax pencil. It is signed with an R on the front, and full signature and date on the back, Richard Britell, Oct., 4 2001.

The History of Doors and Windows

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The buildings across from my studio windows often are the subject of my drawings and paintings. The view consists of a row of downtown main street buildings build between 1880 and 1920. In this respect they are very much the same as all the downtown buildings of cities in the Northeast, cities which took there form after the civil war. They are all masonry buildings, built of either brick or stone. With large stone buildings the openings for the doors and windows present and interesting problem. You can’t just leave a hole for a door or window in the stone work, there has to be some kind of arrangement of stone work above the opening so that the building won’t cave in at these weak points.

In this drawing you can see several of these devices for door and window openings. In the building all the way to the left there is a stone arch over a set of windows, the arch takes the weight of the upper part of the building and sends it down each side of the window. In the next building over to the right you can see keystones over the window. Many old downtown buildings have these keystones, they are carved in a v shape so that it is impossible for them to slide downward.

That third building however was built in 1940, by then all these styles of stonework had disappeared because bricks and stones were no longer the support s for buildings at that time.

All the way over on the right you can see a little landscape above the building with the clock that says three o’clock.Both the clock and the landscape are very true to life, because this is one of those towns of a certain size, where even in the middle of the downtown you can see hills and trees in the distance, when you are checking to see what time it is.

This drawing measures 8.5” x 5.125”. It is drawn on gessoed and tinted cold press watercolor paper with a maroon wax pencil. It is signed with an R on the front, and full signature and date on the back, Richard Britell, Oct., 3 2001.

Marble Collection at the Orphanage

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As I have mentioned before I grew up in Utica New York. If you drive through Utica on the main street you will come to the south end where there is a large bowling alley called the Pin-o-rama. As it’s name would indicate it was built in the late fifties, but before the days of the Pin-o-rama a huge old Victorian building stood on that sight known as the House Of The Good Sheppard. This was a very old fashioned orphanage and all the children who lived there went to my school. The children of the orphanage were unique and unusual in many ways, and many of them were friends of mine from time to time.
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Once, in forth grade, a boy from the orphanage named Raymond was playing marbles with me and some other boys. At a certain point Raymond said, apropos of nothing, “At home I have two thousand marbles.” We simply didn’t believe him, the boys from the orphanage never even had pennies for penny toss so the notion that Raymond could have two thousand marbles was preposterous. Later on the same day Raymond offered to show me his marble collection.

For the first time I entered the orphanage. The outside of the building was grand, like a gothic church but the inside was like a jail and a very cheap old ruinous jail at that. We went up some flights of stairs and came to a cavernous room. In the room were army cots lined up in rows along both walls, next to each other. Half way down the room we came to Raymond’s bunk, and under that bunk was a foot locker half full of marbles, marbles and nothing else.

Later that same year in forth grade Raymond began taking art lessons from an actual artist privately. How that came about I had no idea, but one day just before Thanksgiving our teacher announced that Raymond had learned to draw a turkey, and would draw it for us in chalk on the blackboard. Raymond proceeded to draw a very complicated turkey on the board in colored chalk and I can remember my sense of awe and admiration to this day. It was a conventional drawing of a turkey seen from the front slightly three quarters, but it contained a device that made it seem magical, and that device was “overlap.” He drew the tail feathers but left the shapes incomplete so that he could put the neck in front of the feathers. He left the neck incomplete so that he could put the face over and in front of the neck. He left the face incomplete so that the beak could break through the edge of the cheek, and then came the eyes too marvelous and complex to explain. He did all this rapidly and deftly like someone else might sign their name.

I have to thank Raymond for all of the subtle devices that I have used in my drawing and if you look at it closely you will see that almost every shape must make room within itself for other shapes that overlap and come in front of it.

This drawing measures 8.75” x 10.75”. It is drawn on off white rag drawing paper with a maroon wax pencil. It is signed in the border along the bottom Richard Britell, September 24, 2001.

Paris, or Flatbush Avenue

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I have painted several versions of this painting, some large some small, some horizontal, some vertical. I assume that the image is of Paris but I do not know this for a fact. Many people have told me it is Paris so I have come to think of it as such.

I found this image as part of a magazine article I was reading, the location was not referred to in the article. I made a photocopy of the image and put it in my box of such photographs. I saved the image not because it made me think of Paris, but because it made me think of Brooklyn.

Previously I posted a painting of the Manhattan Bridge, if you drive to the end of Canal street in Manhattan you come to the Manhattan Bridge, if you cross over that bridge you come down into Brooklyn on Flatbush avenue, if you drive up Flatbush Avenue a few blocks you come to a place that looks just like this painting, at least it does to me.

You may object and say that there are no such decorative lampposts on Flatbush Avenue, and all I can say to that is, wait till it is dark enough and raining hard enough and you will see the similarities. All great cities are the same in the dark, in the fog, and in the cold.

This painting measures 8.5” x 11.375”. It is painted on canvas, and is signed with an R on the front, and full signature and date on the back, Richard Britell, September 23, 2001

The Manhattan Bridge

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Of all the architectural forms there are I like to paint the image of a bridge the most. Its form and its purpose are so perfectly symbolic, indicating a transition on a huge scale from one place, or idea, or situation to another. I have read that trains are a great symbol of death. This comes from the fact that for years whenever someone died, people would say, “They went away on a trip”. It seems to me that the bridge is the symbol of a transition to a new life, like marriage, going to college, or starting a new career.

This little painting was not so easy to paint. There are certain problems with an exact painting like this that have to be dealt with . The biggest problem is how to paint all those exact little lines and shapes without letting your hand touch the canvas. You can’t let you hand touch the canvas because the cloth is stretched across the stretchers and it gets dented if you rest your hand on it. In order to paint those little lines and shapes you first hang the painting flat on a wall, next you attach a board horizontally above the painting. Then you take a long stick with a little foot attached at the top. This stick rests on the board across the top of the painting and comes down in such a way that you can rest your hand on it while you are painting. This device looks like, and is called a “bridge” and without this home made tool it would be completely impossible to do a painting like this. At first, when I would do a painting requiring this kind of accuracy, I would set the painting flat on a table, put books on either side of the painting, and then put a board across to act as the bridge. Later I simply used a piece of wood with two small feet attached, but finally I decided to transfer the entire structure to a wall, and work flat on the wall, for this reason. When you paint on a table, you later look at the work hung on the wall, and it often looks so changed in the different light, that you practically have to start all over.

This painting measures 8.5” x 11”. It is signed with an R on the front, and full signature and date on the back, Richard Britell, September 21, 2001

Eternal Grandmother

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If you are fortunate then you can remember your Grandmother. If you are very fortunate then you can remember two Grandmothers. In some cites there are very old women who go to the store every day, they become a Grandmother of everyone that sees them.

You can move away from a city and not return for years and then, returning home, you think, “I hope I get to see that old woman again,” even though you may not even know her name.

Buildings are just the same, we return to them after a passage of years and think, “I’m glad to see that you are still standing.”

This drawing measures 11.5” x 8”. It is drawn on off white drawing paper with a brick color, wax pencil. It is signed and dated across the bottom, Richard Britell, September 19, 2001.

Brownstones in Brooklyn

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Thirty six years had gone by and the gum
that I had left under the edge of the porch
was still there. The words I spoke then
hovered in the air and in my head. The
arrogant, vain, small minded things I
said took my measure, and I had to wear
that suit for many a long year.

This drawing measures 7” x 4.5”. It is drawn on off white drawing paper with a brown wax pencil. It is signed and dated across the bottom, Richard Britell, September 18, 2001.

Two Sisters

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This drawing is of two sisters. In the drawings that I post you can almost never find any expressionism. I am really a very classical artist, and I have a tendency to avoid emotion. I am not talking here about the subject of the drawing, I am talking about the means employed to create the drawing, and in this instance the drawing is highly expressionistic because the character, style, and density of the individual strokes of the pencil have a tendency to exert there identity irrespective of the forms being described. It is easy to spot when a drawing is becoming expressionistic, you begin to see the left handedness, or right handedness of the artist showing up in the marks of the drawing, because the process of drawing is speeded up and there doesn’t seem to be time for the slow development of form by carefully controlled strokes.

These two sisters love each other very much, you can tell that at a glance. They don’t live in the same state so sometimes they don’t speak to each other for a long period of time. Then one will call the other at the same moment that the other is calling the first, and they both will get a busy signal. When this happens they are never surprised.

They like to go shopping for shoes together. In the shoe store one will goad the other into trying on the most idiotic shoes imaginable, this they do with straight, serious faces, saving up their laughter for later.

In my drawing the sister on the right is speaking, and the sister on the left tilts her head to listen, she doesn’t have to tilt her head, she is not hard of hearing, it is just on of those affectionate gestures that they have.

The sister on the right is saying, “Our cars are rusty, we have no money, but at least we’re beautiful and intelligent, and after all you can’t have everything.”

This drawing measures 6.5” x 6.5”. It is drawn on cold press watercolor paper with a soft graphite pencil. It is signed across the bottom in the border Richard Britell September 9, 2001.

Medieval Mind

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In the Middle ages all paintings were done on wood, and there was no such thing as a painting on canvas or linen. When artists wanted to do large paintings they had to glue wooden boards together along the edges. This arrangement was very precarious and it led to a practice called “cradling” where the entire back of a large painting would be covered over with a network of honeycombed slats which were interlocked. Supports on the back and cradling however, never prevented paintings on wood from bending and cracking along the glued seams.

One of the biggest problems with paintings on wood was their weight. On certain days of the year, the large religious paintings in churches were brought out and carried in procession through the town. It was because of the great weight and awkwardness of wooden paintings that led someone to suggest doing special paintings on canvas or linen, specifically to be carried in processions. This was the origin of painting on canvas, beginning in the early Renaissance.

When artists began to paint on canvas they always filled in the cloth texture with a scraper, and filler, and sanded down the surface so that the primed painting surface would be as similar to a wood panel as possible. Later artists realized the attractiveness and usefulness of the cloth texture and began to let it show, and utilized it in conjunction with the brush work. The weave of the canvas became for the painter, like rosin is to the bow of the violinist. This use of the canvas texture can be seen very clearly in the work of painters like Titian, and Giorgione.

For many years I painted only on wood, but at a certain point, I don’t know exactly how long ago, I switched to painting on canvas. My paintings on canvas have not been carried in religious processions. I always fill the canvas at least twice and sand it down so that the cloth texture won’t show, in this respect I want the painting to be as much like a wood panel as possible, but there is no cure for the medieval mind.

This painting measures 8” x 10”. It is painted on canvas which has been filled and sanded, the canvas has painted sides and is stapled in the back, so that framing is unnecessary. The painting is signed with an R on the front, and full signature and date on the back, Richard Britell, September 10, 2001

The City by the Sea

Consider for a moment one thousand years of human history. Consider all the wars and catastrophes, births and deaths. Consider all the people who became immensely famous and wealthy, and then were completely forgotten. And contrast all that with one small fly who is crawling around on the glass of an attic window.

Is it possible to concoct some philosophy, some attitude toward life and history such that the fly would be just as important as that thousand years of human history.

Perhaps it is possible, but one is compelled to ask, “What fly do you mean, and just which window?”

This painting on paper measures 5.25” x 10.25”. It is painted on cold press watercolor paper prepared with several different colors of ground, and acrylic paint. It is signed on the front along the bottom edge, Richard Britell September 7, 2001.

Fog in the City

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Here is the strangest incident that has happened to me in my life. One day I decided to paint the kitchen a different color, it was a drab gray and I wanted to paint it a bright yellow. Even though I was renting the apartment I decided to do a very careful job at my own expense. I cleaned everything patched and sanded the walls, and I even disconnected and moved the radiators so that I could paint behind them.

It was Saturday, my day off. I set to work and worked for several hours. Finally, when I was about half done, I took a break and sat down to drink some coffee and read the paper.

The apartment had three rooms on the ground floor, a kitchen, a living room, and a dining room, these three rooms were lined up in a row and connected by central archways. To read the paper and drink my coffee I sat in the living room, from there I could look through the dining room into the kitchen and admire my paint job. So I sat there drinking my coffee and reading the paper and occasionally looking up at the yellow kitchen. But at one point when I looked up the kitchen had completely disappeared. The living room and dining room were intact but where the kitchen had been there was simply nothing at all.

My first reaction to this situation was complete panic, there was only one possible explanation for the disappearance of the kitchen, which was that while having coffee I had gone out of my mind. I got out of my chair and approached the kitchen doorway convinced that I was about to confirm my own insanity.

What I found when I got to the kitchen was that the heat had come on and the kitchen had filled with steam from the disconnected radiators that I had neglected to turn off. It was just that kind of cool September day, when the heat comes on for the first time after a long summer.

This little painting on paper measures 4” x 5.5”. It is painted on paper prepared with a few coats of gesso, and acrylic paint. It is signed on the front along the bottom edge, Richard Britell September 6, 2001.

Capital of an Ionic Column

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Almost all of the drawings that I have posted on have been representational. Some have been very realistic, and others have been more imaginary in nature, but they have all been pictures of something rather than abstractions. I have not always been a representational artist however, for the first several years of my career I did only abstract work, and the change over to realist work was very gradual.

I was very sensitive to receiving criticism about working realistically from my contemporaries and still remember very vividly two sayings from my student days about realism. One was “He is a simpleminded realist!” and the other was, “Realists, like the poor, are always with us.”

The second statement I could easily understand, but the idea that realists would be in anyway simpleminded did not make any sense to me until years later when I came to understand completely that the truth of the matter. One cannot draw and paint what one sees but one creates an abstraction of tints and tones that is related to what we see. This drawing of mine of a column capital for example is a situation in which all the colors tints and tones of a complex three dimensional object have been reduced down to four tones, the light yellow of the paper, and three clearly discernible tints of the pencil, whereas in reality there would be many more clearly “seeable” tones just in the highlights. It is all really just an abstraction, just simpleminded abstraction.

This drawing measures 8.75” x 10.75”. It is drawn on off white rag drawing paper with a maroon wax pencil. It is signed in the border along the bottom Richard Britell, September 3, 2001.

I Was Willing to Compete

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I WAS WILLING TO COMPETE IN A FOOT RACE. I WAS WILLING TO COMPETE IN THE ARENA OF BUSINESS, MEASURING MY ACCOMPLISHMENTS IN TERMS OF INTEREST POINTS. I KNEW THAT I WOULD LOOSE BUT NEVERTHELESS IN BOTH CASES I BELIEVED THAT EVEN THE LOSS WOULD BE SOME SORT OF ACCOMPLISHMENT. BUT, COME NOW, WAS I TO COMPETE WITH THE STREET LIGHTS OF A FOREIGN CITY, AT NIGHT, REFLECTED IN WET PAVEMENTS? NO, I WOULD GIVE UP COMPLETELY. OR RATHER I WOULD HOPE IN VAIN, AS WE ALL HOPE, TO BECOME THOSE LIGHTS AND SOUNDS, TO BE THE RUMBLE IN THE DISTANCE OF SOMETHING UNKNOWN. THAT IS THE LONGING OF THE IMAGINATION, WHILE AT THE SAME TIME DRAWING THE COVERS MORE CLOSELY AROUND ME IN THE WINTER, COLD, WANTING SOMEONE TO PRESS AGAINST ME FOR THE WARMTH.

Oil on tin
5" x 7"
October, 2008

Painting in the Dark

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Last week I posted a drawing in which I wrote about a book written in the fifteenth century, by Cennini, called the Craftsman’s Handbook. In that book are elaborate but archaic directions for all kinds of painting, and drawing. The drawing I am posting today follows some of these directions very exactly. He says “To do a preparatory drawing first mix up in three bowls three tints of a color, one darker than the next and starting with the lightest tint, with the brush quite dry, shade in all the forms of the drawing. Then go on to the next darker tint, and finish up with the darkest.” All this is to be done on a sheet of paper which has been tinted a middle tone with a wash of watered down paint. When all the shading is done with the brush then you go back and pick out all the highlights with white paint, again with the brush quite dry.

Almost half of the book is devoted to formulas and recipes for mixing and preparing shades and tints and colors in “bowls” for draperies, skys, mountains, flesh, and many other things. But what I am driving at here is the fact that in ancient times, before electric light, or even gas light, colors were not mixed up on the spot as a painter went along, looking at the work and then back at a palate. On the contrary the entire palate of colors and tints for a painting would be mixed up before hand perhaps even in a different place, and carried to the work place in jars.

All the reproductions that we have of old paintings such as the big wall paintings that you see in European churches were photographed with the most modern electric illumination, but if you view these works in there pristine darkness you can hardly see them.

The first thing a painter thinks when looking for example at the Sistine Ceiling is, “How could he ever have seen what he was doing with just candles for light.” So this is where the idea of the controlled palate comes in. Those painters knew what they were doing because the paint had already been mixed, they know what they were doing because the preliminary drawings were done elsewhere and were life sized. These procedures give an artist tremendous control over the image.

This drawing measures 7” x 9.”. It is painted on tinted cold press watercolor paper with a acrylic paint, with highlights put in with white paint and a brush. It is signed with full signature and date in the border along the bottom of the drawing. Richard Britell August 23, 2001.

Church in Kiev

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When I was a junior in college I was looking for apartments at the beginning of a semester, at Syracuse University. In one apartment a desk had been left behind and in the drawer of the desk there was an 8 x 10 black and white photograph of the church in this drawing. There was nothing else in the desk and no markings on the photo other than the name “Kiev”, written on the back. It was obviously an old world War 2 photograph of a bombed out church, probably taken by a soldier.

I didn’t rent the apartment but I kept the photograph and as I was taking a class in etching that semester I did an etching of the image of the church. This was a big event for me because up until that point I considered myself an abstract artist and I did not consider representational subject matter something I should or could do, but I was very moved by the image and wanted to do it as an exception.

Studying the image and drawing it, pulling the prints, I had my first insight into the enormous power of light and shade on three dimensional form. When I finished the etching I printed the class requirement of three prints and taped them up to the drying wall to dry.

The next morning when I returned to cut the dry prints down there was a note attached to one of them requesting a price, someone wanted to buy a print. As there was no name or phone number I wrote a price on the note, I don’t remember how much. The next day there was money in an envelope and one of the prints was gone. From childhood on I sold many paintings and drawings to friends and relatives, but that was my first sale of a work of art to a stranger.

I have often looked through books of collected images of Russian Churches and I have never seen anything like this one. Especially odd is the onion dome on top of a hemisphere and the whole thing only one story high.

Cathedral Interior 2

CATHEDRAL INTERIOR 2

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 eighteen hundreds, and consists of turning the paper upside down.

This drawing measures 8” x 11”. It is drawn on an off white 100% rag drawing paper with a maroon wax pencil. It is signed and dated on the border along the bottom, Richard Britell, August 16, 2001.

Cathedral Interior 1

This is an architectural rendering of a clerestory wall of Ruen Cathedral. As a drawing it has a lot of similarities to the drawing Penn Station, that I posted  earlier. It is similar in that both drawings show a view which is over head and to the right of the observer. These drawings involve perspective to varying degrees, and in all my architectural drawings I have endeavored to explain some aspect or other of that science. The idea of placing the point of view below the picture plane began in the Renaissance just after the discovery of perspective. Artists like Mantegna placed the vanishing point below the bottom edge of the picture because it captures the point of view in which we are looking up at things and it gives the image a sense of grandeur. So in my drawing I chose this style of composition because I wanted to give the subject a feeling of being high up and far away.

Now I know that some people might feel that an interest in perspective is not fashionable, and as a matter of fact perspective hasn’t been mentioned or taught in art schools for sixty years. But the knowledge of perspective answers certain very important questions. For example. What if someone were to say to you, “Why is it that on the back of the five dollar bill, when you look at the columns of Lincoln’s Monument, they have no bases?” This is a fact. Now the answer to this important question involves perspective. Just take a look at a five dollar bill. At first glance the image of the monument on the back doesn’t seem to employ perspective, but on close examination we can see that the tops of the columns at the outer ends of the monument recede in space . The tops of those columns on both sides form diagonal lines. Those diagonal lines are perspective lines which meet at the vanishing point which is one eighth of an inch under the O of the word dollars. Those perspective lines touch the tops of all those receding columns. A line drawn from the same vanishing point to the bottom of the outside columns will show that the bottoms of all the columns are hidden by the steps of the porch.

But here are the two most important points of all. 1: that this engraving on the five dollar bill uses Mantegna’s composition of placing the vanishing point below the picture plane, thereby obscuring the column bases. And 2: Doric columns were used on Lincoln’s Monument, and Doric columns don’t have any bases in the first place.

This drawing measures 7.75” x 9.15”. It is drawn on laid, off white drawing paper with a a brown wax pencil. It is signed with an R on the front and full signature and date on the back Richard Britell August 8, 2001