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.