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