Arguing With the Pope

Rome, Lateran Basilica

The presence of my symptoms of Stendhal's Syndrome existed in me in a state of incubation for some time, and would only surface when I had been looking at art for too long -- for example, after spending an entire day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One day, toward closing time in a museum, I don't recall which one, I found myself stopping exactly half- way between the paintings which were hung on a long expanse of gray velvet-covered wall. I would look at a small section of the velvet, skip past the next painting, and then proceed to another section of velvet between two other paintings. The paintings were those huge black ones in which all you can see is darkness, glare from the lights, and occasionally an elbow or knee emerging from shadows.

After looking at so many large black paintings, even the frames of which were hard work to look at, it was kind of a pleasure to look at the gray velvet. This kind of viewing was upsetting, however, to the guards who immediately became suspicious and asked politely if they could "help" me. When I replied that I didn't need any help, they would continue to eye me strangely and were only happy when I went on to another room.

At another time I could not tear myself away from watching a safe being moved by a tall crane when I was supposed to be going to the Museum of Modern Art to see an important exhibition everyone was talking about. By the time the safe was securely in place and all the people watching had satisfied themselves about which building it was intended for, the museum was closed and I was forced to return home without seeing the show.

I do not think, however, that this illness is at all unique to me. Who, for example can remember the scenes from movies we saw as children? On the contrary we remember the theatre very well but the movies hardly at all. I can't even remember the movies or the theaters. Instead I remember the sensation of emerging from the theatre and finding out that it was already completely dark outside where as when I went in it was still bright day. I would be disconcerted by the darkness. Walking home, I would be upset by disquieting thoughts. What might have happened out here during the day while I was beguiled and in a trance? Perhaps while I was watching some actor being stabbed on the screen, someone I knew and loved was dying in real life. And I would practically run home to assure myself that nothing had changed, that everything was all right.

When I arrived in Rome everything was already so strange. They have phones, but they are a different shape and color. There are taxis, subways, streetlights, and sidewalks, but all configured in such a different manner that everything seemed to be rushing toward me with a strange intensity. In many instances, I was unable to enter churches and museums because what was transpiring in front of these establishments was just too arresting. In short, there were simply too many safes being moved from one place to another for me to bring myself to enter. For example, I came across an especially large and impressive church, the Lateran Basilica, and on the steps was a person addressing a throng of people. He was talking about how the foundations of that church dated from Roman times and that it had been continuously revised and rebuilt. He explained in detail how a certain architect was asked to submit plans to the Pope for a reconstruction and that his plans were rejected. But the architect was undaunted; he so believed in his plans that he argued with the Pope. He had the audacity to argue with the Pope! He won the argument and the Pope accepted his plans.

How marvellous. I was transfixed listening to the story. I understood something important. We must all go and argue with the Pope, and we must win our argument!

I could not bring myself to enter the church; I didn't want to disturb that feeling. I walked away saying to myself, "I want to have an argument with the Pope, right away."

Stendhal's Syndrome

Giuseppe Arcimboldo circa 1550

I so much wanted to write about the Quadriennale in Rome. It is a huge show which claims to survey all the important work going on in Italy at this time, and other related movements elsewhere in the world. It is an important international exhibition. I was unable to do so, however, to the extent that I desired due to the return of a malady I've had for several years now. This illness I have is a variation of Stendhal's syndrome, that condition he described when he became delirious from looking at too much art in Florence.

I still recall the day I was exposed to this illness and the appearance of its first symptoms after a short incubation. It was ten years ago and I was assisting with the installation of a show in a gallery. A young girl came in, about ten years old; it was her habit to stop by the gallery on the way home from school. She was acquainted with every one in the gallery since she was the daughter of a well known painter. Although young, she was nevertheless very familiar with the ways of galleries and often entertained us with her art knowledgeable banter.

I was standing next to a long wooden extension ladder that was lying flat on the floor when she came up to me and asked very matter- of-factly, "Whose piece is this?" She was asking about the ladder on the floor and it immediately struck me that it was very much like a work of art in every way. It lay on the floor at just the right angle to the walls, but even more, it expressed in metaphor, my feelings about my life at that time.
She was not serious of course. She did not really think that the ladder was a piece in a show, but children of artists have a remarkable amount of disrespect for art. Sometimes they have no interest in art at all. I think it aggravates them, but they are drawn into it none the less. Who can resist such banter? She continued, "It's like something I've seen by Kounellis." I was thinking of some way to reply but she went off to talk to some one else.

This then was the beginning of my illness, a confusion of perception. It expressed itself at first as an inability to distinguish what is and what is not art: an inability to separate the art from its immediate surroundings, and everything becomes elevated to the same exact degree of importance.

To Hear You in my Mind’s Ear

“I began To See You in my Mind’s Eye, To Hear You in my Mind’s Ear.’

With each drawing that I post I like to give some specific information which only the creator of a work like this might know. With this drawing I would like to point out its color. I like to use an earth red for figure drawings, and it has been a favored color with artists for drawing the figure for hundreds of years. The red of the pencil, and the redness of blood both come from the same source, iron. So if one draws with an earth red on a slightly yellow piece of paper, once the drawing begins to develop it is exactly as if the tip of the pencil were passing back and forth over the actual figure, and not a drawing at all, it sometimes seems like a living thing.

I wanted to show a scan of the drawing and not a photograph and therefore it is only possible to present that part of the drawing that fits in my scanner. The image is larger in all directions. There is a little more space at the top, the figure ends a little below the knees and there is more space left and right. Unlike my other drawings, this drawing does not have a border line around the outside edge.

The drawing measures 18” x 11.25”, it is drawn on an off white, warm toned laid paper. It is signed and dated across the bottom left, Richard Britell, June 7, 2001.

The Inevitability of Love

There was a man who lived on the upper east side of New York, who fell in love with a woman who would walk her dog near his apartment building. Many times he would be on the verge of speaking to her but at the last moment he would turn away, or change his mind. He composed in his mind several sentences about her dog, that would start a conversation but in the end he would think to himself, “I’m not really interested in the dog and so, if I start a conversation with her in that way it will all be false.”

Such scruples were quite all right and wouldn’t have mattered except that a year and a half had gone by since he first saw her and things had reached such a point that he avoided other relationships because of the mysterious woman with her dog.

Finally he decided to do something drastic. He decided to buy a dog himself, and then start a conversation with her about the dogs. The desperate point he had reached can be seen by the extreme measure he proposed to himself. He went to the pet store and went through all the motions of buying a dog, he was even writing out the check when he turned around abruptly and walked out of the store without a word.

He went straight home, sat down next to his window and made a vow to himself to forget all about the woman with her dog, but the phone rang and it was his good friend Oscar. Oscar said, “I just this afternoon bought a dog, and now I find I have to go out West for a week, could I impose on you to watch him for me, he’s not much trouble.” What happened then you can well imagine!

The Stone Boat, A Story

This drawing of a stone boat is an illustration for a very short story of mine related to the “Three Little Pigs.” The story however is about five mice. Here it is, in much abbreviated form.

Five mice named Jason, Rason, Dason, Clayson, and Mason live on a farm where they are in constant terror of the cat. They have a meeting and decide that if they build a house in the yard then they can play outside all they want and retire to the protection of their house if the cat should appear. Like the three little pigs they first build a house of straw. The cat appears and the mice hide in the house of straw. The cat sleeps all afternoon on the stoop, and goes into the house in the evening but the wind blows the house away and the mice realize their mistake. The mice then build a house of wood which also offers them protection all day from the cat, but collapses when the dogs tail thumps against it. Finally they build a secure and permanent house of bricks and mortar, and this turns out to be the perfect reliable refuge. Their success emboldens the mice to build a boat so they can go sailing on the lake nearby. They hold a meeting and the eldest mouse, Mason, declares, “Every thing good is made out of bricks and mortar, everything else is trash.” This kind of thinking is natural coming from a mouse with a name like Mason. The mice all take his advice and build an elaborate boat of bricks, only to see it sink in a very few minutes. The stone boat floated only long enough for its picture to be drawn. The mice swim to safety and proceed to build a boat of wood. Now a boat of wood should work in theory, but mice know very little about boat building technique, they neglected to caulk the seams and the wood boat sank even faster than the stone boat. Then, for a long tome, the mice were totally perplexed but the youngest mouse, sitting by the edge of the lake happened to see some straw and string float past and thought to himself, “Nothing can sink a straw!” So, reluctantly taking the advice of the youngest mouse, Rayson, The five mice built a boat of straw tied together with string. This boat is perfect, they use it all the time, and lately they have been loaning it to the cat when they aren't using it.

This drawing was done with a red wax pencil on thick watercolor paper which was prepared in a very curious way. I painted a thick coat of white gesso onto the paper and just before it was completely dry I pressed it up against some bricks to give it a kind of masonry texture, this gave me a little bit of a head start in drawing the bricks of the boat but if you look carefully you may see some particles of brick dust stuck in the paper surface.

A Man Descending from Some Tall Stilts

In March (2000) I sold my first drawing on ebay titled, “Dark Green Man On Stilts.” That drawing depicted a man on a set of very tall stilts, so tall in fact that there was no way for him to get down. I thought that it was probably a metaphor,saying that the stilts might represent the precariousness, and difficulties of life. In the drawing the man was enjoying a cup of coffee and I concluded the narrative saying that the drawing represented our need to enjoy life regardless of its impossible difficulties.

Well that is all well and good, and the man is just a metaphor and all that, but I left him in an impossible situation, that needed some resolution. Today when I got to the studio it occurred to me, he can get to a tree and climb down from there.

So here he is at the dramatic moment of transition. He has let go of the stilts and grabbed hold of the tree, loosing his coffee cup and saucer in the process.

The point of this drawing probably is, “Don’t be afraid of change.”

Cecilia Nude, Braiding her Hair

This is my favorite model to draw from. She is especially good in that she doesn’t charge anything and is always available, since she is entirely imaginary. You may think, looking at her, that she is a little overweight, but she is not overweight at all she just appears to be that way in the drawing. Just like fashion photography requires thin models because the camera makes the figure fuller, so in drawing people always appear fuller than they actually are. Perhaps you do not believe me and think I am making this up as a jest, No I’m not, it is a scientific fact. Here, let me explain.

The body was constructed by nature to draw circles and ellipses. For example, if you hold your whole body still and just rotate one finger from the joint where it connects to the palm, it will describe a quarter circle. Or, keeping everything else still and just moving your hand back and forth from the wrist will produce a shape like a quarter circle also. Going on to the elbow joint, using just that joint your arm will automatically “draw” a half circle. The whole arm from the shoulder gives a full circle. Consequently, you can see that all the joints of the body act like compasses big and small producing various sized circles and parts of circles. No wonder it is then that artists always have there figures come out looking round. So much so that one of my drawing teachers used to say, “If your figure doesn’t look like link sausages it isn’t any good.”

So where do straight lines come from, some how it is a kind of freak of nature that arises from the interaction of two joints at the same time, for example just put your index finger against your thumb and rock them back and forth as if you were threading a needle, you get a straight line from the interaction of the two finger joints.

So you see round figures such as you find in Picasso, Ingres, Rubens and others are not an artistic style or whim, but the result of an absolute law of nature!