A Berkshire Sampler

I call this drawing a Berkshire sampler because it contains nine small sketches of things or places in Berkshire County that are particularly interesting or beautiful. Berkshire County is in Western Massachusetts. It is a summer resort area with many very serious cultural attractions, especially in the category of preforming arts. Tanglewood is here, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Tanglewood, as it’s name implies, is a huge area of beautifully landscaped grounds with gentile hills, large meadows, and ancient trees of great beauty. It not a manicured beauty, but a beauty rough about the edges just like a Hudson River School painting, which it is really connected to geographically.

Looking at my drawings left to right from the top: The first image is Hawthorne Street looking South. The big hedge of bushes on the left is .over twelve feet high and forms the border of the Tanglewood property. Out of the hedge rises a large tree part way down the road, this is the Lion’s Gate entrance to the grounds, so named because of the lion sculptures on top of flanking pedestals at the entrance. This view is especially interesting because it contains the entrance to the grounds used by non-paying teenagers, attending popular music concerts. At the extreme left bottom of the hedge is a little tunnel through the hedge which also passes safely through two chain link fences which run down the center of the hedge. I have never used this entrance, my daughters pointed it out to me one day.

The second image is one of the lion faces from the lion’s gate entrance. The third image is what you see if you look to the right when you are looking at image number one. This is the view looking South from Hawthorne Street. Here the land falls sharply away cut by rows of trees at intervals which were formerly the borders of farmers fields. These big fields are also giant parking lots whenever there is a concert. There are three of these big grassy fields bordered by trees and then your eye gets to Stockbridge Bowl, a very round lake that can be seen right in the middle of the drawing. After the lake the landscape rises up again with a series of receding hills. It is just this tendency of the landscape here, to rise up and down, cut by open fields and variegated patched of various types and colors of trees that makes this landscape so famous for it’s beauty. It is really like the Isle of the Sirens in the Tale of Odysseus, once you see it you can’t tear yourself away from it.

Hawthorne Street, of the first three images, is so named because at one time Nathaniel Hawthorne lived there. I decided to do a drawing of the famous Hawthorne House which is almost directly across from the Lions’ Gate, but I was amazed to find that the original house burned down over a hundred years ago. The house in the drawing is the very next house after where the Hawthorne house once stood. It is a modest little house but one of my favorite houses in Berkshire County. It is old, unpainted stucco, with an orange Mediterranean tile roof. What looks like two entrances is really a door and a symmetrical opening for a porch.

I thought if I made mention of Hawthorne in my set of drawings I should also include another equally famous American author who lived here. In Pittsfield is Arrowhead, the home of Herman Melville. He lived in a large very ordinary looking New England farm house. I went there but could find nothing I wanted to draw. When I was leaving however I came across this very beautiful piece of sky at the back of the visitor parking lot, so I have included that. It is drawing number five, right in the center. Here again, as in the Tanglewood images, the landscape shows the sky to best advantage by dropping down a long way into a valley, and then rising up again in the distance clothed in blue like the sky itself.

The next image is more up to date. This is the Lenox Coffee Shop in the Town of Lenox. This is my favorite place to drink coffee and read a book on a summer afternoon. I am sure there are many people who believe two dollars is too much to pay for coffee but I am not among them. To have an equivalent coffee drinking experience you would absolutely have to fly to someplace in Europe, and that would cost at least $1200 by today’s rates. So every time I have coffee here I feel that i have saved myself a thousand dollars at least, and soon, at the rate I am going, I will be able to buy the little stucco house on Hawthorne Street.

The seventh drawing brings us back to Hawthorne Street again but this time looking North. I put this view in for three reasons, first because it shows how in just one spot there are interesting views in all directions, but also because of a detail. The trees and foliage grow over the road in a full simple arch and the road passes through a tunnel of foliage as it dips and turns around a bend. As an experience, if you are driving, this is equal to the most sophisticated V.W commercial. Also, this view has a hill in the background where once stood the gigantic summer home of Andrew Carnegie. The Carnegie estate was called Shadowbrook, and it succumbed to a huge fire long ago just like the Hawthorne house. Carnegie was just another one of a great many famous people past and present who chose to live here, though they could have lived anywhere.

No survey is complete without a restaurant recommendation, and for this I include my favorite. The eighth image is the D’Amico hot dog stand just South of Great Barrington, on Route Seven. This is the best place to eat ,complete with picnic benches of peeling red paint under the shade of five or six towering pines. Across Route Seven, and just a few steps North of the hot dog stand is an old piece of rusting farm equipment, I only noticed it because I was walking up the highway looking for a good place to do the Hot Dog Stand drawing. It is down in a depression and I include it because I was reminded of how there used to be farms and old farm equipment all over this landscape and now there are none, the same is true of the hot dog stand, this is our only one.

Dimensions:7.75” x 9.75”
Materials: Pencil on cream color drawing paper
Signature: Along the bottom edge: Richard Britell, July 27, 2002

2017 Broadway, The Ansonia

I am not a New Yorker. This fact came home to me very vividly the first time I ever entered a gallery in New York hoping to interest it’s director in my work. I chose a gallery which was exhibiting huge images of woman’s heads in black and white, images over eight feet high and six feet wide which filled the windows of their space on Madison Avenue. I went in feeling some trepidation. In a large empty room sat a beautiful foreign looking woman at a huge desk. I walked up to her and said, “I would like to show the gallery director a portfolio of my paintings and drawings.”

She said, “I’m sorry sir, but this isn’t a gallery, it’s a hair salon.”

The above is the truth, it’s the absolute truth. But nevertheless I did manage to have several one person shows in New York City. My first show consisted of only paintings of architecture. There were thirty-two paintings in the show and I sold every one. The show was reviewed in the New York Times by Hilton Cramer. This is an excerpt of what he said.

There are modes of realism in which the depiction
of concrete detail is so concentrated- and so obsessive-
that the visual result bears a distinct esthetic kinship to pictorial
abstraction. Mr. Britell’s subject matter is drawn from the world
of pre-modernist architecture. What he focuses on are the brick
facades,stonework structures and the elegant decorative
embellishments that were once a standard feature of neo-
classic and other historicist styles of American urban
architecture. These he depicts with a great deal of pictorial
force. Often the facade of a building is observed in the kind of
close up view that becomes, in effect, the equivalent of
a geometrical abstract painting. He has a very analytical
eye, and he commands an impressive technique. If there is also an
element of nostalgia in these works it isn’t particularly bothersome.
After all, we all have ample reason to cherish this architecture
today, and Mr. Britell’’s homage to it proves
wholly equal to it’s quality.


The drawing in this listing is an example of what he was talking about.

Fear Of Flying

I flew to Europe once. The plane took off at dinner time and by two in the morning we were somewhere over the mid-Atlantic. I was very afraid of flying and sat wide awake, staring out of the window. I had a seat over the wing. it was a brand new plane, just put into service. I stared intently at the wing, the curve of the engine, the flaps of the wing, the rivets.

A small dark spot appeared on the wing just above the engine. It was very small at first but gradually it got a little bigger. I thought that my eyes were playing tricks on me, but after a while I could see a distinct triangular dark patch on the wing above the engine. But where could a dark patch come from on the wing? Could the engine be heating up the wing because of some malfunction. I decided to wait and see if the dark patch got large enough to cover a certain rivet on the wing. Gradually the dark patch got larger and larger until it covered the rivet and most of a flap.

I went to the back of the plane where a hostess was dozing contentedly sitting on a milk crate. I said, “Can you tell me why there is a dark patch on the wing?” The hostess came to my seat and looked at the wing, then she said, “I don’t know, I’ll go and find out though.”

Then passed a very curious few minutes, which I thought would be my last. I gazed at the sleeping travelers and thought to myself, “I’m the only one that knows that we are all about to..........

But the hostess came back with this explanation. The dark spot was the shadow of the tail fin, cast upon the wing by the light of the moon. It “appeared” because that night there was a total eclipse of the moon, and as the moon emerged from the shadow of the earth it’s light lit up the plane, forming the shadow on the wing.

Hearing that was a big relief!

Dimensions: 5.5” x 7”
Materials: Acrylic paint on gessoed paper
Signature: Along the bottom edge: Richard Britell, July 16, 2002

The Metropolitan

This is a difficult perspective because the lines across the face of the drawing recede at such a slight angle that the vanishing point that they converge to is out of range of a ruler, or even a yard stick. What to do in this situation is to mark off a set of measurements down the left of the drawing and a proportionally larger set of marks, outside the drawing, down the right. These marks then act as a guide for any important line in the drawing one wants to check. The image shows these marks down the left hand side outside the drawing border. I have never seen this done by anyone else, I made the method up years ago when I was doing a large painting and the vanishing point of the perspective was out in the yard someplace. Nevertheless, with this drawing the method wasn’t accurate enough so I had to resort to the nail and string method. You find the vanishing point and place a nail there, and pull a string over to the drawing and check your lines with it.

I love this view of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which shows those strange piles of marble above the doorways, have you ever noticed them. When the Met was built they intended to put huge sculptures of things like naked men with swords up there, but the times caught up with them and before the sculpture was commissioned the idea of marble people up on the roof had become out of date. But those piles of rough cut marble give the Met a grand, ancient, unfinished look like the Cathedrals, or Pyramids. This was not what the builders intended, but great nevertheless.

Dimensions: 8.5” x 14”
Materials: pencil on buff color watercolor paper
Signature: Along the bottom edge: Richard Britell June 13, 2002

I Was Born in Utica

Like everyone else I am very egocentric. I imagine that upon very careful and thoughtful analysis, the place where I live will turn out to be the center of the universe. And after all how is one to calculate exactly where that center is. As far as I can understand modern mathematics, the center of any system is determined by how you are looking at it. Furthermore I think that everyone feels that they are in the center of the universe, but they are just too shy to say so.

Anyway, my notions are grounded in a curious historical fact. I was born in Utica. When I was growing up, the New York State Thruway was being built. On the thruway for many years the mileage markers at the ten mile intervals were set from Utica. Therefore as you drove along you would pass signs saying: Utica 80 miles, and then Utica 70 miles and so on. It was therefore natural for me as a small child to imagine that there would be similar signs in France, or Belgium, or even China for that matter, telling everyone how far away Utica was.

The mileage signs on the Thruway have been changed now, and I did sometimes wonder how such an inconspicuous collection of dilapidated buildings in upstate New York could be so important.

Dimensions: 2.5"; x 7" including the black border
Materials: Oil paint on palladium, on paper. (Palladium is a precious metal that does not tarnish. It looks like silver but costs more than gold.)
Signature: In the bottom right corner: Full signature and date on the back: Richard Britell, May 4, 2002

Faraway Look

It’s math class in grade school. The teacher says “I have five apples and I buy five more apples, now how many apples do I have, Johnny?” Johnny says, “I can’t answer the question because I don’t like apples.”

It’s not like that in math class but it is always like that in art class. People want to draw and paint pictures of the things that they love, and you can hardly get them to look at or draw pictures of things that they hate.

When I taught school often a woman would say to me “My daughter is drawing and painting all the time, will you look at her things and tell me if she should go to art school.” Then the mother would bring to school a huge pile of paintings and drawings, all of horses, and I would have to say, “Your daughter is probably interested in horses, not drawing and painting.”

But those drawings of horses represent a fundamental principal of art, which is that we have a deep and permanent longing to make and elaborate images of things that we love.

Dimensions: 6.5” x 3.75”
Materials: Wax pencil on off white watercolor paper
Signature: The initial R at the bottom right hand corner, full signature and date on the back: Richard Britell, July 21, 2002

Their House was on a Pedestal

In order to do this little painting on gilded paper, first I had to attach some 23 karat gold to the paper. This has been done since ancient and medieval times by various methods. The method I used consists of coating the paper with a fairly quick drying varnish, When the varnish is set up, but not dry you lay the gold on it in little sheets. Care must be taken such that the varnish is not still to wet, in which case the gold keeps it from drying, or too dry, in which case the gold will not stick.

I am fond of reading directions for this kind of work in old manuscripts and books, because there is a lot of useful information, but for the most part, because they give such a vivid portrait of the extremely, “real” conditions and practices of art before everything was available by mass production in stores. From the text that follows one gets an idea of how fully art and life could become one and the same thing.

FROM CENNINI’S CRAFTSMAN’S HANDBOOK, WRITTEN ABOUT 1435.

How to make a mordant from garlic, for gilding:

“Take clean garlic bulbs and pound them in a mortar, and
then squeeze them through a linen cloth two or three
times. Take this juice,and work up a little white lead
and red clay with it as fine as ever you can.Then scrape
it up and keep it in a little covered dish; and keep it for
the older and more seasoned it gets, the better it will be.
Do not use small garlic bulbs, nor young ones; but get
them about half grown. And when you want to use
any of this mordant, put a little of it in a glazed
dish, with a small amount of urine, and stir it up thoroughly
with a straw, according to your judgment. You may gild with this
mordant after half an an hour in the way described...........”

I didn’t use this recipe, but a modern formula instead.

Midnight West of Denver

click image to enlarge
MIDNIGHT WEST OF DENVER

I felt sorry for Raymond when I got that letter that I posted with yesterday’s drawing. Like so many highly educated people, he approaches old works of art with a guide book and a preconceived notion of some emotional response. A response which is elusive, and impossible to engineer of fabricate. Expecting to be moved by something usually guarantees that we will feel nothing at all For example, I have never been to Saint Peters, and I have never seen the Sistine Chapel. But every time I talk to someone who has, I always here the same story, something like this.
“There were hundreds of people all going through at once, we couldn’t stop. We looked at the ceiling with our heads thrown back, walking, and everybody was bumping into everyone else. The man on my right kept bumping into me with his camera. Thinking about that, a contrasting image occurred to me. It is 8;00 A.M. and tourists are making their way through the Sistine Chapel. But it is also midnight somewhere West of Denver. A trucker is out on the turnpike, there is almost no one else in sight. He has to drive all night. He can see the Rockies in the distance, and he thinks, “morning will come and I won’t have reached them.” He is terribly bored, he lights a cigarette, blows the smoke out the window, and turns on the radio.. It is Bonnie Rait, singing:
Rock steady all night long,
Rock steady till the light of dawn,
Slow and easy, tried and true,
Rock steady,--------just me and you.

He feels a long rush of blood to his face, the hair on his neck stands on end, and he experiences a long moment of elation. He settles himself in his seat, and his boredom returns, another song comes on the radio. It’s R.E.M., embedded in the lyrics is the phrase, “Just a truck stop, instead of Saint Peters”, The trucker thinks, “I wonder what sand peters are.”

Dimensions: 7” x 7.4”
Materials: Acrylic paint on watercolor paper
Signature: In the bottom right Richard Britell, Sept. 5, 2002

While Putting on her Lipstick

click image to enlarge
Usually when I begin a drawing I know exactly what it is I am going to draw, and how I am going to compose it. At other times I will have a lot of ideas floating around in my head and I will just start randomly drawing on the paper with no particular object. This style of drawing is very transparent and has a dreamy quality because you can see through the forms. All the figures have something in common, they all have that abstracted look that comes from concentrating on something. The woman on the far left is putting on her lipstick, as she does this she is thinking of all these other things which have appeared in the drawing. Drawings like this lead to other drawings later on. The bald man in the upper left is a jeweler who is looking at a watch, the watch is second hand, it is one of two. He is about to say, “This one is the better one, just look at the movement of the second hand, how tight and precise it is”.

Dimensions: 11.75" x 8.25"
Materials: Pencil on laid drawing paper
Signature: bottom edge, Richard Britell, June 6, 2002