The Red Trunk

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I have kept all my old drawings and some small paintings from over the years in a red trunk. The trunk itself has an interesting history. In 1953 it was thrown out with a big pile of trash from a house on Genessee Street in Syracuse, New York. My Uncle Louis Scalzo, who was a law student at Syracuse University at that time, was driving by. He saw the trunk and put it in the back of his new 1953 Ford coupe.

Later he came to visit my mother in Utica, and everyone was admiring his new car. He opened the trunk of the car to get out his bags and there was this old red trunk. When we asked him what it was for he didn’t have any answer at first, but later he said, “I have this new car, and I want to be able at any time to put everything I own into that red trunk, and go anywhere I want on the spur of the moment.”

But it didn’t work out that way. My uncle became a lawyer, got married, bought a house, raised three children, and left the trunk, and what it represented in my mother’s attic.

Years later I adopted the red trunk because my mother was going to throw it out. I began to use it to store my paintings and drawings in, but as it soon became full it’s role became the place I would keep anything special, unusual, or important. Periodically the contents would get purged as my tastes changed. I would go through the contents of the trunk always with mixed emotions because it was like a history of my career and my life at the same time.

The biggest problem of the trunk were the figure drawings. It took me so many years to learn to draw the figure that there were literally hundreds of bad figure drawings that I had kept, God knows why. This stack of figure drawings was reduced by repeated purges until there were only four or five of them left. I found it very interesting to notice that in the end, I only kept the drawings of the figures that I did from my imagination, the drawing in this post is an example.

Recently I decided to throw the trunk away. I didn’t like keeping my history in a trunk. I decided to either throw away, frame, exhibit, or give away everything and empty out the red trunk.

Finally came the moment when I had to put the trunk next to the dumpster. I said to it, “Every thing dies in the end.” It just sat there silently, it didn’t say a single word.

But my daughter saw the trunk by the dumpster. She said, “What do you think you’re doing, you can’t throw this out.” She took in home and now it is in her attic. When I asked her what she was going to use it for, she didn’t have any answer.

Dimensions: 11” x 8”
Materials: Red conte crayon on prepared paper with white highlights in chalk
Signature: Along the bottom edge: Richard Britell , 1996