Woman's Head

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This is a very subtle drawing and there are a great many things I could say about it, but I am going to confine myself to talking about aspects of the technique of the drawing. To begin the drawing I tinted a piece of watercolor paper with a series of washes of terra cotta color. I brought the paper to a certain tint such that when I started to draw with a terra cotta pencil the lightest tones would not show up at all since they would be identical in color to the paper itself. This gave me the ability to bring up the tones and shadows gradually out of the color of the paper, which allows for great control of the tonality of the drawing.

The same is true for the white highlights, some of them are the undisturbed tint of the paper such as the right side of the nose, and some are white chalk which rises out of the color of the paper in such a way that you cannot see the softer strokes at all.

Another subtility of the drawing is the actual paper surface. The surface isn’t exactly paper at all. I filled the paper with acrylic filler, and while it was drying I sprinkled it with fine brick dust and pressed it into the surface. The drawing is of a piece of sculpture, and this surface very beautifully indicates that aspect of marble where the sculptor has brought the surface to perfection and yet the stone must insist on it’s own identity by revealing its little fissures and dents. This, to my eye, is not a fault at all but one of the most beautiful aspects of the surface of sculpture.

Dimensions: 8.3” x 5.25”
Materials: Terra cotta wax pencil on prepared paper
Signature: Bottom edge, Richard Britell, Dec.7, 2001

Virginia Woolf, and Dostoevsky

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This text is a continuation of the text for the Dostoevsky portrait that I posted yesterday. And what does Virginia Woolf have to do with Dostoevsky? Nothing that I am aware of, but the text for the Dostoevsky drawing talks about how he must have been influenced by the photographs he saw during his lifetime, since photography was just beginning in the middle to late 19th century. I gave several examples of Dostoevsky’s writing that I thought illustrated a kind of photographic perception. Later I remembered that there is a passage in “The Idiot,” in which Dostoevsky actually has his principal character describe a photograph.

Below is the passage, the character is Prince Mishkin and he is describing a photograph of a woman whom he will later fall in love with.


“It is a wonderful face, and I feel sure that her destiny is
not an ordinary one. Her face is smiling enough, but she
must have suffered terribly - hasn't she? Her eyes show
it- those two bones there, the little points under her eyes,
just where the cheek begins. It’s a proud face too, terribly
proud. And I can’t say whether she is good and kind or not.”
“And would you marry a woman like that?”
“I cannot marry at all, I am an invalid”


And what has this to do with Virginia Woolf? Descriptions in literature can never hope to create a truly specific image, instead we think of some image that we know, that the text reminds us of. This text from “The Idiot,” makes me think of this archetypical image of Virginia Woolf.

"Virginia Woolf" Richard Britell, painting, oil on canvas, 8.5" x 6" 2003
Location: Britell Studio , Pittsfield, MA
Price: $1200.00

Dostoevsky

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This portrait of Dostoevsky was done from one of the few photographs made of him during his lifetime. Photography was just beginning when Dostoevsky was writing and I happen to think that he was influenced by the photographs he saw. Either he was affected by photographs or he was driven by the same desire to record the peculiar idiosyncratic detail of everyday life. Before photographs drawing and painting never attempted to record fleeting but highly individualised detail.
Dostoevsky wasn’t the first writer to do this however, his predecessors were equally keen observers. Take this example from Gogol’s “The Overcoat.”

“Petrovich reached for his round snuffbox, exactly which one is hard to say, as someone had poked his finger through the place where the face should have been and it was pasted over with a square piece of paper.” (Incidentally, that image is a metaphor for Russian society, the Russian Revolution, and the subsequent communist society.)

Or this example from Pushkin’s “Egyptian Nights.”

“He wore a black frock coat already greying at the seams, and a pair of summer trousers although it was well into autumn, a fake diamond glittered on his yellow shirt front...”

But Dostoevsky brings this kind of observation to an entirely different level, both in terms of precision, and in terms of meaning, suggestion, and metaphor. Take for example this passage from “Crime And Punishment.”

“He wore an old completely ragged black frock coat, which had shed all its buttons. Only one somehow still hung on, and this one he kept buttoned, obviously not wishing to shirk convention.”

Or this example from “The Brothers Karamazov.”

“This gentleman wore a thin topcoat, stained and patched. His trousers were of a light checked material such as no one wore anymore,and they were so crumpled below the knees that they didn’t reach his shoes, so it looked as though he had outgrown them, like a growing boy”

Sometimes his descriptions go beyond photography and seem to set a stage for cinema, such as this passage from “The Devils.”

“As for the Captain himself, he slept on the floor, without bothering to undress. Crumbs, dirt, and wet puddles were everywhere; a large soaking wet floor-cloth lay in the middle of the first room, together with an old, worn out shoe in the same puddle.”

And sometimes Dostoevsky brings literature beyond even cinema in his ability to describe an event in such a way that its visual image can never be forgotten, as in this example from “House of the Dead.”

“I asked Katya if she remembered her teacher. She looked at me without a word, turned her face to the wall and burst into tears.” (from the introduction)

Painting, oil on paper 1993, Richard Britell 6.5" x 6"
Collection of Julia Britell

Where Did I get This Shirt

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When I was thirteen I talked my best friend into going camping with me in the Adirondacks. We lived in Utica, New York, and the intended destination was a resort town called Old Forge. Early on a Saturday morning we set off with our packs, on bicycles, for this destination which was sixty miles distant.

We were not prepared for the fact that we were pedaling into the mountains and the trip turned out to be uphill all day long. We arrived in the late afternoon, rented a canoe, and paddled to a place called Alger Island, an island for camping accessible only by boat. As soon as we were out of the canoe and on the island we laid down in a lean-to, more dead than alive, and fell absolutely sound asleep.

I was the first to wake up, and since my friend was still sleeping and the sun had not set, I went out in the canoe by myself for a short while. No sooner did I get a little way out from the shore than a huge storm began, with fierce gusts if wind and hail. This storm blew me out into the middle of the lake and then blew me right out of the canoe. There was a terrible moment in the water when I realized that the canoe was still upright and blowing away but since it was two thirds full of water I managed to catch up to it. Once back in the canoe the storm, as if with a mind of its own, proceeded to blow me to the further shore. Once the canoe was beached I tipped it over, crawled under it to get out of the rain and hail and then just lay there grateful to be alive.

There was a knock on the canoe, someone looked under the edge and said, “Would you like some Pancakes?” I was ship wrecked on the beach of a camp, and the owners took me in, gave me a change of dry clothes, and explained that they had watched me capsize from their porch, and were just about to come after me when I got back into the canoe.

When we were finished with a dinner of pancakes the storm ended, the setting sun came out from behind clouds, and I thanked them and headed out in the canoe, for the island The water was now calm and still, and orange in the light of the setting sun.

Back at the lean-to my friend was still sound asleep having slept through the storm. I woke him up and told him the whole story. He refused to believe any part of it. I said, “Well then, where did I get this shirt?

This entire little painting on heavy weight paper is carried out very expressionistically, but in the bottom can be found a tent, an overturned boat, a dock with a canoe next to it, one of those pine logs on the ground with all those short little broken off branches, a lake, some mountains, and light trying to shine through the clouds of an overcast sky. A lot of the texture is three dimensional in nature and comes from the paper itself, the surface is waxed and polished with a rag giving it an interesting finish which doesn’t show up in a scan.

This drawing measures 5.25” x 8.5”. It is painted on gessoed and tinted watercolor paper with a acrylic washes of paint. It is signed and dated on the back, Richard Britell, October 7, 2001.

Greyhound

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There is a collection of drawings in four volumes the title of which is “Great Drawings of All Times,” selected and edited by Ira Moskowitz. The volumes are large and all the reproductions are in full color. These books were published in 1962 and I have never seen anything anywhere better than this collection.
For many years I have looked at the drawings in those books and they presented certain almost insolvable problems. The thing that puzzled me the most was this: I would look at a drawing, and I would see that it was full of the most glaring errors that drawings are prone to, incorrect proportions, confused unfinished shapes, accidentally silly facial expressions, and yet when taken as a whole the drawings, despite there problems, appeared somehow perfect.

Once, in an attempt to figure this out, I copied a number of the drawings. In most cases the drawings were on medium to dark colors of paper, and the drawings were done in colors just somewhat darker than the paper itself. Suddenly everything became clear to me, it was the color of the paper, and the colors of the drawing materials that were beautiful, and not the chosen subject matter, and furthermore when drawings have such subtle tints placed on a tinted ground the figure and the ground merge together just like smoke, and “mistakes” have no visual meaning.

So I came to this conclusion, a maroon wash of ink on a dusty pink piece of paper was beautiful in its own right, and the subject added yet something more to a wonderful combination. This drawing of mine is a good example of this effect.

This drawing measures 7” x 6.5”. It is drawn on painted and tinted watercolor paper with a red wax pencil. There are some highlights in the drawing which were put in by scratching through the ground with a razor blade. It is signed and dated across the bottom, Richard Britell, October 6, 2001.

History of Doors and Windows part 2

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The basic shapes of the brick and stone work above windows and doors in masonry buildings remained unchanged in most respects for thousands of years. An arch of bricks above a window, or the appearance of a big single stone over a door or window opening is much the same in buildings built in 1880 as in buildings built in Roman times. At the end of the Nineteenth Century however builders introduced iron and steel into the construction of buildings, and from that point on tall buildings were supported by a steel structure, and the brick and stone facing became partly decorative, and partly a protection from the elements. Window and door openings no longer needed keystone arches or single lintel stones, because the steel was all the structure that was necessary. At that point however the brick and stone work remained the same stylistically, probably from the force of habit, for about twenty years. As the modern era began, the structural stone work, which had become ornamental, slowly began to disappear.

In this drawing the building on the far left was built as the styles were changing, the forms are basically like an old stone building, but if you look carefully you will see that the brick work above the windows is different. The bricks are set in vertically all in a row, with no arch or keystone. Setting the bricks on edge was lip service to the old decorative brick work, but when you see bricks above a window all set in a row like that, it means that they rest on a steel I beam, if they didn’t rest on an I beam then that part of the wall would collapse. The two buildings in the middle were built in the fifties so we will pass over them in silence. Behind those two middle buildings there is the cement wall of a concrete and steel building built in the Seventies. That building in the background there, is a perfect surface for graffiti. Fortunately the building on the right casts its shadow over the graffiti so that it is not too bothersome.

You may want to ask, “How did the graffiti artists manage to paint so high up on the wall?” The answer is that there is a ladder laying on the roof, you can see it there in the drawing. And what is that big masonry arch doing in the side wall of the building built in the fifties that I was going to pass over in silence? It is the remaining wall of a building that burned down in 1950, which had stood on that spot since 1895, and was incorporated into the building built in the fifties. You can still see the marks in the cement work on the side of the building on the left where the old building once met the wall of the outer building.

The building on the far right is the oldest building in this drawing, it was built in 1868. You can tell that it was built in 1868 because it says so in the arch over the second floor. The same group of Italian stone masons built the 1868 building, and the building that burned down, you can tell by the style of an arch over three windows which was one of their trademarks.

You may want to look at the doors and windows in the buildings of your town and compare their styles to the occasional date stones on the buildings and see just how accurate a dating method this is for American buildings of the 19th and 20th Centuries.

This drawing measures 5.125” x 8.5”. It is drawn on gessoed and tinted cold press watercolor paper with a maroon wax pencil. It is signed with an R on the front, and full signature and date on the back, Richard Britell, Oct., 4 2001.

The History of Doors and Windows

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The buildings across from my studio windows often are the subject of my drawings and paintings. The view consists of a row of downtown main street buildings build between 1880 and 1920. In this respect they are very much the same as all the downtown buildings of cities in the Northeast, cities which took there form after the civil war. They are all masonry buildings, built of either brick or stone. With large stone buildings the openings for the doors and windows present and interesting problem. You can’t just leave a hole for a door or window in the stone work, there has to be some kind of arrangement of stone work above the opening so that the building won’t cave in at these weak points.

In this drawing you can see several of these devices for door and window openings. In the building all the way to the left there is a stone arch over a set of windows, the arch takes the weight of the upper part of the building and sends it down each side of the window. In the next building over to the right you can see keystones over the window. Many old downtown buildings have these keystones, they are carved in a v shape so that it is impossible for them to slide downward.

That third building however was built in 1940, by then all these styles of stonework had disappeared because bricks and stones were no longer the support s for buildings at that time.

All the way over on the right you can see a little landscape above the building with the clock that says three o’clock.Both the clock and the landscape are very true to life, because this is one of those towns of a certain size, where even in the middle of the downtown you can see hills and trees in the distance, when you are checking to see what time it is.

This drawing measures 8.5” x 5.125”. It is drawn on gessoed and tinted cold press watercolor paper with a maroon wax pencil. It is signed with an R on the front, and full signature and date on the back, Richard Britell, Oct., 3 2001.