Lost in the South Bronx

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This detailed drawing is done from my memory of being lost in the South Bronx. Since this happened to me more than once there are a lot of accumulated images that I have managed to fit into the drawing, not the least of which is the tire, the muffler, and the hub cap in the bottom left hand corner.

At the extreme bottom of the drawing is the Cross Bronx Expressway, and one of those exit ramps that lead up into an endless, sprawling neighborhood of tenements, crowds of people, and small businesses with foreign names. I have tried to give the drawing the feeling that the buildings go off at odd angles forever, and that there is no orderly plan to the streets so that getting lost is inevitable.

There are millions of things happening in the drawing. I could tell you about a heroin addict who is on his way to sell his girl friend’s radio, while she lies asleep on the bathroom floor. It is an old Grundig Short Wave Radio that belonged to her Grandfather. The heroin addict has made up his mind to sell it for forty dollars, but he will take twenty-five. The thought of fifteen dollars makes him really angry and he starts arguing with himself. I could tell you about a scrap metal merchant who has been buying copper futures, and has just made a huge sum of money despite himself, just because his car is stuck in traffic and his phone doesn’t work.

But I’d rather tell you about the three boys on the bridge on the left side of the drawing, under the No Left Turn Arrow. They are young hoodlums that like to hang out on the corner of the bridge. They make bets with each other about whether the cars that come up the exit ramp will click all there doors locked when they have to stop at the turn. There greatest joy is to approach the drivers window of a car that has turned left at the corner and motion for the driver to roll down the window. Then passes a long terrible moment while the driver imagines that he is about to be robbed, hijacked, or worse. Finally the driver thinks, “Well, I might as well give in to my fate, what’s the use.” He takes a heavy sigh and rolls down his window, and the boys say, “You’re going the wrong way, on a one way street, man!”

They are doing him a favor but he expects the worst. He drives away from a moment never to be forgotten, and the boys say, “Did you see his face, did you see his face,” And laugh until there sides ache.

West Side Highway

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The elements of this painting are:
1.The coast of New Jersey
2.The Hudson River
3.A barge
4. Some docks
5. The West Side Highway.

The coast of New Jersey, the river and the barges have remained unchanged for many years, but those docks and the elevated highway are gone. When you drove down that elevated highway one always wanted to take a good long look at those docks as they flew past but it was impossible. You were going fifty miles an hour around very sharp curves with cars almost touching yours in front, in back, and on the side, all bordered with low steel walls. The pavement was a sort of dark yellow bricks, all wavy and uneven and full of holes, The bricks gave off a rapid corrugated buzzing sound telling you every instant exactly how fast you were going. It was a hair raising and intimidating experience. Crazy thoughts would flash through your mind and you would think, “ I’m either going to die now, or get stuck in traffic on 42nd Street two or three minutes from now.”


Dimensions: 8" x 13.75"
Materials: Acrylic on stretched canvas.
Signature: Along the bottom edge: Richard Britell May 28, 2002

Engraved and Gilded Math Homework

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I check the oil in my car all the time, like a ritual. And even though it is a ritual, I never remember to have a piece of cloth, or a paper towel to wipe the dip stick on. I look around the parking lot for a piece of paper on the ground. Today it was Clarance Washington’s spelling test. Clarance is in the sikth grade. His spelling is almost as bad as mine is. His whole personality was clearly reflected in his test paper. The sheet is covered with red corrections and yet he writes. “I love doing my homework.”

He has to make up a sentence using the word popcorn. He starts to write “I love buttery", but he can’t figure out how to spell buttery, so he crosses it out. Then he can see that his teacher will see his misspelling, so he crosses it out again even harder.

I’m not making this up at all. The paper is right here on my table. I didn’t use it for the oil. It plunged me for a moment back into my own childhood. I labored over my homework and tried to make it perfect to no avail. Why, if I could have engraved my homework I would have, if I could have gilded it I would have done that also. Anything, anything I could think of to please them.

Dimensions:
Materials: 23 k gold on watercolor paper
Signature: Along the bottom edge: Richard Britell , May 27, 2002

The Square Root of 2

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This is what my father was like. One day when I was twelve I went with him on Saturday morning to my Aunt Mary’s house to have coffee. While we were having coffee my father said, “The’re are cracks in the ceiling.”

My aunt said, “We keep patching them up, but they just keep coming back.”

The next Saturday I went with my father to a construction yard where he bought plaster and some lath. Then we went to my Aunt Mary’s for coffee, after which he pulled down the whole ceiling, nailed up the lath, and spread a coat of plaster over it.

When he was done the ceiling was dark brown. I asked him, “Why is the ceiling brown?”

“It’s the base coat,” he said, “next Saturday we will put up the finish coat.”

That was 1956. The next year my father died. He was forty five.

When I was forty five I went to visit my Aunt Mary on a Saturday morning for coffee. We got to talking about my father. She said, “You know, your father put up this ceiling and plastered it.”

“I remember.” I said.

“You know what was odd about it though,” she went on, “When he cut the lath he mitered all the corners.”

“Why not miter them”, I said, “After all, you have to cut them anyway.”

A strange expression crossed my Aunt’s face and she said, “Those were your father’s exact words at the time.”

So that explains the idea behind this drawing of the square root of two.

The notion that things can actually go on forever.

"The Square Root of Two" oil on canvas 2002, 10.5" x 8" signed on the back
Location: Britell Studio, Pittsfield, Ma. $1200.00

Pythagoras's Theorem

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Download this drawing. Then put it in a nice frame and hang it in your child’s room. Then wait and see what happens.


Dimensions: 7.25” x 6.75”
Materials: pencil and acrylic paint on prepared paper
Signature: Along the bottom edge: Richard Britell, May 17, 2002

I Had The Key

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My daughter called me last night and told me to go outside and look at the stars, because there was an alignment of the moon and two planets.

It was late. I stood on the sidewalk and looked up at the sky. I live in the bad side of my town.

A police car came by and pulled up next to the curb where I was standing, but the policeman didn’t say anything to me.

Across the street a black man was walking along with his head shrouded in a hood. As he passed, the police car pulled away and stopped on the other side of the street next to the man in the hood, but he just continued walking along. A moment later the car drove rapidly away, and at the corner put on its lights and siren. I wanted to shout over to the man in the hood, “Don’t you feel relieved?” But I didn’t.

I looked back at the moon, and at the aligned planets. I thought, “Yes, now I have the key!”:

All this is all in my picture. There is the key, and at the bottom there is myself, the black man, the police car and a tree. The moon and planets are there also but they are behind the key, so you cannot see them.


Dimensions: 5.25” x 3.75”
Materials: 23 K Gold, on prepared paper
Signature: An R in the bottom right and full signature on the back: Richard Britell , May 15, 2002
Collection: Don and Maggie Buchwald, NYC

Old Jewish Tailor Woman

The first job I ever had was in high school working in the afternoon for an elderly Jewish woman who was a tailor. Her work consisted mainly of repairing the tattered garments of the residents of the slums where her shop was located, but she also took in washing which was sent out to be done and came back the next day. My job was to mark in all the clothes when they came in, and check them off when they went out again. This old tailor woman whose name was Mrs. Potash, I soon discovered was an extremely remarkable and eccentric woman. She was very devout, but her God was not some unfathomable power off in the cosmos somewhere, for her God was an entity involved in the most mundane aspects of every day life. She consulted God about what to have for lunch. For Mrs. Potash tailoring was a kind of religious mission, she felt that her store, her sewing machine, even her life were given to her by God for the sake of taking care of poor peoples clothes.

I left the shop for home each day at five, but Mrs. Potash would not go home until midnight. She returned to the shop by six in the morning to start her day. She lived on the other end of town so every day involved walking through the slums of our city late at night. At one point I started to be concerned about her. I couldn’t decide if she was fearless or simpleminded. I said to my mother “You know Mom, Mrs. Potash walks home at one in the morning from down on Liberty Street. “ My mother said, sensing my concern, “Don’t worry about her, the police know she is there.”

But gradually I came to realize that she was not only fearless, but that she knew instinctively that no one would ever even think of harming her.

One time an old notorious gangster came into the shop. He was probably as old as Mrs. Potash, and known to be a dangerous and difficult character. He didn’t come into the shop for any criminal purposes however, he came in because a button had popped off of his fly.

He asked her to repair his trousers but she was a woman of very few words and in response to his request she simply drew a circle in the air with her needle indicating that he should undo his jacket. Understanding that she meant to fix his fly button on sight, as it were, and without him going to the changing room he stammered in embarrassment, ”Don’t you want me to go to the changing booth?”

“And why is there a need to take off your clothes?” she said, again telling him what to do with a gesture of her needle.
That remark “Why is there a need”? was characteristic of her. If I did something wrong in the shop she would say, “Why is there a need to make a mistake?”

The Don undid his coat revealing that he had a revolver stuck in his belt band. Mrs. Potash, when she saw the gun, pulled it out of his pants and holding it in her hand gave him a good talking to. “Don’t you see that the gun is running your trousers, I can fix these buttons for you, but before you know, the waste band will be completely ruined. A holster you need.” Finished with her lecture she handed him the gun to hold and proceeded to sew a button onto his pants.

He was so terribly uncomfortable, he held the gun in his hand on the side of his body away from the window lest anyone should see, and was in an agony of suspense the whole time worrying that someone might come into the shop.

This event was made the more strange by the fact that it was August, there was a hot steam trouser press in the shop, the room was scorching, and over the years the old woman had take to wearing very little clothing to work in the summer. Her usual outfit was a shift, or sort of sun dress very low cut in both the front and the back.

I will not offer any sort of explanation or analysis of this event. In certain respects I have to admit that I still don’t understand some powerful symbolism in it. But I saw it with my own eyes, and I wanted you to see it also. Events like this should not be forgotten.

Hopper, Rockwell, Salinger

In 1930 Edward Hopper painted a work that he titled “Early Sunday Morning,” and it depicts a street of stores and second floor apartments like one might see in Brooklyn. The buildings are painted square to the viewer with the sidewalk and street running straight across the bottom of the picture, and a band of sky running straight across the top.

About 1945 J.D.Salinger, wrote this description in “The Catcher In The Rye.” It also describes a city street on a Sunday morning. Here is the passage.

“This family that you could tell just came from church were walking rightin front of me - a father, a mother, and a little kid about six years old. They looked sort of poor. The father had on one of those pearl-gray hats that poor guys wear a lot when they want to look sharp”

In 1953 Norman Rockwell combined those two images, the family
going to church and the Hopper Street Scene to do the April 1953 Post cover called “Walking to church,” the street is just the same, and the man actually has on a pearl-gray hat.

Here is my version of this idea, it takes more from Hopper, and less from Rockwell, my view is from that time of night when the sky is just beginning to get light in the east. It is still dark out and there are a few lights on as some people are just up and getting ready to go to work.

This is a little painting on paper, all the lights were put in with a brush and white paint. I wanted to differentiate between the light which comes from a light source, such as the street lamps, and the light which is reflected, such as the light on the pavement. In order to do this, after all the lights were in I put a yellow glaze over the entire painting and then put the lights back in with pure white for the lamp lights. In this way the dots of light from the street lamps are a little brighter than the other lights. But what about that lit window in the upper right, isn’t that a light source? It was, but I had to draw the shade, as someone was getting dressed in there.

Dimensions: 5” x 7”
Materials: Acrylic on water color paper
Signature: Along the bottom edge: Richard Britell , April 5, 2002

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