The City by the Sea

Consider for a moment one thousand years of human history. Consider all the wars and catastrophes, births and deaths. Consider all the people who became immensely famous and wealthy, and then were completely forgotten. And contrast all that with one small fly who is crawling around on the glass of an attic window.

Is it possible to concoct some philosophy, some attitude toward life and history such that the fly would be just as important as that thousand years of human history.

Perhaps it is possible, but one is compelled to ask, “What fly do you mean, and just which window?”

This painting on paper measures 5.25” x 10.25”. It is painted on cold press watercolor paper prepared with several different colors of ground, and acrylic paint. It is signed on the front along the bottom edge, Richard Britell September 7, 2001.

Fog in the City

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Here is the strangest incident that has happened to me in my life. One day I decided to paint the kitchen a different color, it was a drab gray and I wanted to paint it a bright yellow. Even though I was renting the apartment I decided to do a very careful job at my own expense. I cleaned everything patched and sanded the walls, and I even disconnected and moved the radiators so that I could paint behind them.

It was Saturday, my day off. I set to work and worked for several hours. Finally, when I was about half done, I took a break and sat down to drink some coffee and read the paper.

The apartment had three rooms on the ground floor, a kitchen, a living room, and a dining room, these three rooms were lined up in a row and connected by central archways. To read the paper and drink my coffee I sat in the living room, from there I could look through the dining room into the kitchen and admire my paint job. So I sat there drinking my coffee and reading the paper and occasionally looking up at the yellow kitchen. But at one point when I looked up the kitchen had completely disappeared. The living room and dining room were intact but where the kitchen had been there was simply nothing at all.

My first reaction to this situation was complete panic, there was only one possible explanation for the disappearance of the kitchen, which was that while having coffee I had gone out of my mind. I got out of my chair and approached the kitchen doorway convinced that I was about to confirm my own insanity.

What I found when I got to the kitchen was that the heat had come on and the kitchen had filled with steam from the disconnected radiators that I had neglected to turn off. It was just that kind of cool September day, when the heat comes on for the first time after a long summer.

This little painting on paper measures 4” x 5.5”. It is painted on paper prepared with a few coats of gesso, and acrylic paint. It is signed on the front along the bottom edge, Richard Britell September 6, 2001.

Capital of an Ionic Column

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Almost all of the drawings that I have posted on have been representational. Some have been very realistic, and others have been more imaginary in nature, but they have all been pictures of something rather than abstractions. I have not always been a representational artist however, for the first several years of my career I did only abstract work, and the change over to realist work was very gradual.

I was very sensitive to receiving criticism about working realistically from my contemporaries and still remember very vividly two sayings from my student days about realism. One was “He is a simpleminded realist!” and the other was, “Realists, like the poor, are always with us.”

The second statement I could easily understand, but the idea that realists would be in anyway simpleminded did not make any sense to me until years later when I came to understand completely that the truth of the matter. One cannot draw and paint what one sees but one creates an abstraction of tints and tones that is related to what we see. This drawing of mine of a column capital for example is a situation in which all the colors tints and tones of a complex three dimensional object have been reduced down to four tones, the light yellow of the paper, and three clearly discernible tints of the pencil, whereas in reality there would be many more clearly “seeable” tones just in the highlights. It is all really just an abstraction, just simpleminded abstraction.

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 3, 2001.

I Was Willing to Compete

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I WAS WILLING TO COMPETE IN A FOOT RACE. I WAS WILLING TO COMPETE IN THE ARENA OF BUSINESS, MEASURING MY ACCOMPLISHMENTS IN TERMS OF INTEREST POINTS. I KNEW THAT I WOULD LOOSE BUT NEVERTHELESS IN BOTH CASES I BELIEVED THAT EVEN THE LOSS WOULD BE SOME SORT OF ACCOMPLISHMENT. BUT, COME NOW, WAS I TO COMPETE WITH THE STREET LIGHTS OF A FOREIGN CITY, AT NIGHT, REFLECTED IN WET PAVEMENTS? NO, I WOULD GIVE UP COMPLETELY. OR RATHER I WOULD HOPE IN VAIN, AS WE ALL HOPE, TO BECOME THOSE LIGHTS AND SOUNDS, TO BE THE RUMBLE IN THE DISTANCE OF SOMETHING UNKNOWN. THAT IS THE LONGING OF THE IMAGINATION, WHILE AT THE SAME TIME DRAWING THE COVERS MORE CLOSELY AROUND ME IN THE WINTER, COLD, WANTING SOMEONE TO PRESS AGAINST ME FOR THE WARMTH.

Oil on tin
5" x 7"
October, 2008

Painting in the Dark

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Last week I posted a drawing in which I wrote about a book written in the fifteenth century, by Cennini, called the Craftsman’s Handbook. In that book are elaborate but archaic directions for all kinds of painting, and drawing. The drawing I am posting today follows some of these directions very exactly. He says “To do a preparatory drawing first mix up in three bowls three tints of a color, one darker than the next and starting with the lightest tint, with the brush quite dry, shade in all the forms of the drawing. Then go on to the next darker tint, and finish up with the darkest.” All this is to be done on a sheet of paper which has been tinted a middle tone with a wash of watered down paint. When all the shading is done with the brush then you go back and pick out all the highlights with white paint, again with the brush quite dry.

Almost half of the book is devoted to formulas and recipes for mixing and preparing shades and tints and colors in “bowls” for draperies, skys, mountains, flesh, and many other things. But what I am driving at here is the fact that in ancient times, before electric light, or even gas light, colors were not mixed up on the spot as a painter went along, looking at the work and then back at a palate. On the contrary the entire palate of colors and tints for a painting would be mixed up before hand perhaps even in a different place, and carried to the work place in jars.

All the reproductions that we have of old paintings such as the big wall paintings that you see in European churches were photographed with the most modern electric illumination, but if you view these works in there pristine darkness you can hardly see them.

The first thing a painter thinks when looking for example at the Sistine Ceiling is, “How could he ever have seen what he was doing with just candles for light.” So this is where the idea of the controlled palate comes in. Those painters knew what they were doing because the paint had already been mixed, they know what they were doing because the preliminary drawings were done elsewhere and were life sized. These procedures give an artist tremendous control over the image.

This drawing measures 7” x 9.”. It is painted on tinted cold press watercolor paper with a acrylic paint, with highlights put in with white paint and a brush. It is signed with full signature and date in the border along the bottom of the drawing. Richard Britell August 23, 2001.

Church in Kiev

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When I was a junior in college I was looking for apartments at the beginning of a semester, at Syracuse University. In one apartment a desk had been left behind and in the drawer of the desk there was an 8 x 10 black and white photograph of the church in this drawing. There was nothing else in the desk and no markings on the photo other than the name “Kiev”, written on the back. It was obviously an old world War 2 photograph of a bombed out church, probably taken by a soldier.

I didn’t rent the apartment but I kept the photograph and as I was taking a class in etching that semester I did an etching of the image of the church. This was a big event for me because up until that point I considered myself an abstract artist and I did not consider representational subject matter something I should or could do, but I was very moved by the image and wanted to do it as an exception.

Studying the image and drawing it, pulling the prints, I had my first insight into the enormous power of light and shade on three dimensional form. When I finished the etching I printed the class requirement of three prints and taped them up to the drying wall to dry.

The next morning when I returned to cut the dry prints down there was a note attached to one of them requesting a price, someone wanted to buy a print. As there was no name or phone number I wrote a price on the note, I don’t remember how much. The next day there was money in an envelope and one of the prints was gone. From childhood on I sold many paintings and drawings to friends and relatives, but that was my first sale of a work of art to a stranger.

I have often looked through books of collected images of Russian Churches and I have never seen anything like this one. Especially odd is the onion dome on top of a hemisphere and the whole thing only one story high.

Cathedral Interior 2

CATHEDRAL INTERIOR 2

This is the second in a series of architectural drawings. It is an extremely complicated drawing in all respects and there are a great many approaches I could take to discussing it. I could talk about its tonal range, and aspects of light and shading. I could talk about the relationship of expressionism to classicism, and where this drawing does or doesn’t fit in. I could talk about Freudian, or sexual symbolism in the drawing, this wouldn’t be hard considering all of the groin vaults right in the middle of the picture. But all those topics are going to have to wait until I have finished with the topic of perspective.

This drawing presents one of the most difficult perspective problems an artist must deal with, the problem of drawing big circles, or ellipses in succession. Not only are there numerous big arches but there are sets of them slowly decreasing in size and blocking each other out.

In classical perspective theory there is a procedure for drawing circles and ellipses. First you draw the square that the circle fits into. You draw this square in perspective and this automatically gives you four points of the ellipse, the points where the circle is tangent to the square. Then you draw a series of about twenty crossing and intersecting lines through the square in perspective, too complicated to explain here, and this will give you a number of additional points on the ellipse. With all these points as a guide you draw the ellipse. This never works, however, because all the thousands of guide lines make your drawing look like a dish of sauerkraut rather than a drawing.

I have utilized the above method many times but even with all those points as a guide one always ends up relying on one’s eye and the natural tendency of the wrist and hand to draw an ellipse naturally. Artists always end up drawing these troublesome shapes freehand, you simply rest your wrist in the proper relationship to the curve being drawn and then rotate your hand back and forth. If your line comes out a little off, you let the shadows gobble up the mistakes.

You may want to ask me, “That's fine, with that method a left handed person can draw the right side of an ellipse, but what about the other side of the shape where the fingers have to contract?” This is an extremely good and important question and I’m glad you asked it. From the time of the cave paintings until the Renaissance perspective was unknown, its discovery solved many problems artists face. The problem of how to draw the opposite, or inner side of an ellipse was discovered in the late eighteen hundreds, and consists of turning the paper upside down.

This drawing measures 8” x 11”. It is drawn on an off white 100% rag drawing paper with a maroon wax pencil. It is signed and dated on the border along the bottom, Richard Britell, August 16, 2001.