Marble Collection at the Orphanage

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As I have mentioned before I grew up in Utica New York. If you drive through Utica on the main street you will come to the south end where there is a large bowling alley called the Pin-o-rama. As it’s name would indicate it was built in the late fifties, but before the days of the Pin-o-rama a huge old Victorian building stood on that sight known as the House Of The Good Sheppard. This was a very old fashioned orphanage and all the children who lived there went to my school. The children of the orphanage were unique and unusual in many ways, and many of them were friends of mine from time to time.
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Once, in forth grade, a boy from the orphanage named Raymond was playing marbles with me and some other boys. At a certain point Raymond said, apropos of nothing, “At home I have two thousand marbles.” We simply didn’t believe him, the boys from the orphanage never even had pennies for penny toss so the notion that Raymond could have two thousand marbles was preposterous. Later on the same day Raymond offered to show me his marble collection.

For the first time I entered the orphanage. The outside of the building was grand, like a gothic church but the inside was like a jail and a very cheap old ruinous jail at that. We went up some flights of stairs and came to a cavernous room. In the room were army cots lined up in rows along both walls, next to each other. Half way down the room we came to Raymond’s bunk, and under that bunk was a foot locker half full of marbles, marbles and nothing else.

Later that same year in forth grade Raymond began taking art lessons from an actual artist privately. How that came about I had no idea, but one day just before Thanksgiving our teacher announced that Raymond had learned to draw a turkey, and would draw it for us in chalk on the blackboard. Raymond proceeded to draw a very complicated turkey on the board in colored chalk and I can remember my sense of awe and admiration to this day. It was a conventional drawing of a turkey seen from the front slightly three quarters, but it contained a device that made it seem magical, and that device was “overlap.” He drew the tail feathers but left the shapes incomplete so that he could put the neck in front of the feathers. He left the neck incomplete so that he could put the face over and in front of the neck. He left the face incomplete so that the beak could break through the edge of the cheek, and then came the eyes too marvelous and complex to explain. He did all this rapidly and deftly like someone else might sign their name.

I have to thank Raymond for all of the subtle devices that I have used in my drawing and if you look at it closely you will see that almost every shape must make room within itself for other shapes that overlap and come in front of it.

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 24, 2001.

Paris, or Flatbush Avenue

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I have painted several versions of this painting, some large some small, some horizontal, some vertical. I assume that the image is of Paris but I do not know this for a fact. Many people have told me it is Paris so I have come to think of it as such.

I found this image as part of a magazine article I was reading, the location was not referred to in the article. I made a photocopy of the image and put it in my box of such photographs. I saved the image not because it made me think of Paris, but because it made me think of Brooklyn.

Previously I posted a painting of the Manhattan Bridge, if you drive to the end of Canal street in Manhattan you come to the Manhattan Bridge, if you cross over that bridge you come down into Brooklyn on Flatbush avenue, if you drive up Flatbush Avenue a few blocks you come to a place that looks just like this painting, at least it does to me.

You may object and say that there are no such decorative lampposts on Flatbush Avenue, and all I can say to that is, wait till it is dark enough and raining hard enough and you will see the similarities. All great cities are the same in the dark, in the fog, and in the cold.

This painting measures 8.5” x 11.375”. It is painted on canvas, and is signed with an R on the front, and full signature and date on the back, Richard Britell, September 23, 2001

The Manhattan Bridge

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Of all the architectural forms there are I like to paint the image of a bridge the most. Its form and its purpose are so perfectly symbolic, indicating a transition on a huge scale from one place, or idea, or situation to another. I have read that trains are a great symbol of death. This comes from the fact that for years whenever someone died, people would say, “They went away on a trip”. It seems to me that the bridge is the symbol of a transition to a new life, like marriage, going to college, or starting a new career.

This little painting was not so easy to paint. There are certain problems with an exact painting like this that have to be dealt with . The biggest problem is how to paint all those exact little lines and shapes without letting your hand touch the canvas. You can’t let you hand touch the canvas because the cloth is stretched across the stretchers and it gets dented if you rest your hand on it. In order to paint those little lines and shapes you first hang the painting flat on a wall, next you attach a board horizontally above the painting. Then you take a long stick with a little foot attached at the top. This stick rests on the board across the top of the painting and comes down in such a way that you can rest your hand on it while you are painting. This device looks like, and is called a “bridge” and without this home made tool it would be completely impossible to do a painting like this. At first, when I would do a painting requiring this kind of accuracy, I would set the painting flat on a table, put books on either side of the painting, and then put a board across to act as the bridge. Later I simply used a piece of wood with two small feet attached, but finally I decided to transfer the entire structure to a wall, and work flat on the wall, for this reason. When you paint on a table, you later look at the work hung on the wall, and it often looks so changed in the different light, that you practically have to start all over.

This painting measures 8.5” x 11”. It is signed with an R on the front, and full signature and date on the back, Richard Britell, September 21, 2001

Eternal Grandmother

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If you are fortunate then you can remember your Grandmother. If you are very fortunate then you can remember two Grandmothers. In some cites there are very old women who go to the store every day, they become a Grandmother of everyone that sees them.

You can move away from a city and not return for years and then, returning home, you think, “I hope I get to see that old woman again,” even though you may not even know her name.

Buildings are just the same, we return to them after a passage of years and think, “I’m glad to see that you are still standing.”

This drawing measures 11.5” x 8”. It is drawn on off white drawing paper with a brick color, wax pencil. It is signed and dated across the bottom, Richard Britell, September 19, 2001.

Brownstones in Brooklyn

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Thirty six years had gone by and the gum
that I had left under the edge of the porch
was still there. The words I spoke then
hovered in the air and in my head. The
arrogant, vain, small minded things I
said took my measure, and I had to wear
that suit for many a long year.

This drawing measures 7” x 4.5”. It is drawn on off white drawing paper with a brown wax pencil. It is signed and dated across the bottom, Richard Britell, September 18, 2001.

Two Sisters

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This drawing is of two sisters. In the drawings that I post you can almost never find any expressionism. I am really a very classical artist, and I have a tendency to avoid emotion. I am not talking here about the subject of the drawing, I am talking about the means employed to create the drawing, and in this instance the drawing is highly expressionistic because the character, style, and density of the individual strokes of the pencil have a tendency to exert there identity irrespective of the forms being described. It is easy to spot when a drawing is becoming expressionistic, you begin to see the left handedness, or right handedness of the artist showing up in the marks of the drawing, because the process of drawing is speeded up and there doesn’t seem to be time for the slow development of form by carefully controlled strokes.

These two sisters love each other very much, you can tell that at a glance. They don’t live in the same state so sometimes they don’t speak to each other for a long period of time. Then one will call the other at the same moment that the other is calling the first, and they both will get a busy signal. When this happens they are never surprised.

They like to go shopping for shoes together. In the shoe store one will goad the other into trying on the most idiotic shoes imaginable, this they do with straight, serious faces, saving up their laughter for later.

In my drawing the sister on the right is speaking, and the sister on the left tilts her head to listen, she doesn’t have to tilt her head, she is not hard of hearing, it is just on of those affectionate gestures that they have.

The sister on the right is saying, “Our cars are rusty, we have no money, but at least we’re beautiful and intelligent, and after all you can’t have everything.”

This drawing measures 6.5” x 6.5”. It is drawn on cold press watercolor paper with a soft graphite pencil. It is signed across the bottom in the border Richard Britell September 9, 2001.

Medieval Mind

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In the Middle ages all paintings were done on wood, and there was no such thing as a painting on canvas or linen. When artists wanted to do large paintings they had to glue wooden boards together along the edges. This arrangement was very precarious and it led to a practice called “cradling” where the entire back of a large painting would be covered over with a network of honeycombed slats which were interlocked. Supports on the back and cradling however, never prevented paintings on wood from bending and cracking along the glued seams.

One of the biggest problems with paintings on wood was their weight. On certain days of the year, the large religious paintings in churches were brought out and carried in procession through the town. It was because of the great weight and awkwardness of wooden paintings that led someone to suggest doing special paintings on canvas or linen, specifically to be carried in processions. This was the origin of painting on canvas, beginning in the early Renaissance.

When artists began to paint on canvas they always filled in the cloth texture with a scraper, and filler, and sanded down the surface so that the primed painting surface would be as similar to a wood panel as possible. Later artists realized the attractiveness and usefulness of the cloth texture and began to let it show, and utilized it in conjunction with the brush work. The weave of the canvas became for the painter, like rosin is to the bow of the violinist. This use of the canvas texture can be seen very clearly in the work of painters like Titian, and Giorgione.

For many years I painted only on wood, but at a certain point, I don’t know exactly how long ago, I switched to painting on canvas. My paintings on canvas have not been carried in religious processions. I always fill the canvas at least twice and sand it down so that the cloth texture won’t show, in this respect I want the painting to be as much like a wood panel as possible, but there is no cure for the medieval mind.

This painting measures 8” x 10”. It is painted on canvas which has been filled and sanded, the canvas has painted sides and is stapled in the back, so that framing is unnecessary. The painting is signed with an R on the front, and full signature and date on the back, Richard Britell, September 10, 2001