Drawing, Profile Portrait of Leadbelly

A few years ago I came across a dog dictionary at a tag sale. I bought the book and took it to my studio where I proceeded to draw several of the dogs in the book. Of several hundred images I did a dozen dogs. Later I went to the library and got images of a dozen famous men to juxtapose with the dogs. I called the series “Dogs and Men”, all of those images but three are sold now but I still have a bull terrier, and the image that went with it, the musician, “Leadbelly”.

This image is drawn from a mug shot taken at a time in his life when he had been arrested for murder. I am very fond of this drawing, especially the way it captures his pensive but proud look.

Drawing, A broker Waving Goodby with his Hat

If you saw the drawing I posted yesterday, then you know that the stockbroker lost his hat on Wall street, and a homeless man went off with it. But in this drawing you can see that the stockbroker has his hat back and is waving goodbye to someone with it. This is what happened, the homeless man sold this hat back to the stockbroker for 100 dollars. In this drawing you can see that the hat is up in the air and there are buildings down under the hat. This is completely correct because if you go outside and hold a hat up in the air, your hat and your hand will be “in” the sky, and everything else will be underneath it.

And if you ask me, “Richard why is the hat lit from the left, and the building lit from the right? I would answer that the buildings were drawn at the bottom of the paper four years ago, and the hat about fifteen minutes ago. Furthermore the buildings were drawn in the morning and the hat was drawn in the afternoon.

Drawing, A Day in the Life of Six Hats

This is actually six drawings. They are all the same size and materials. Whomever buys these drawings is going to need to know the following information.

HAT 1: This is a party hat. It was purchased yesterday for the birthday of the man who is asleep there in bed, you can see his foot in the drawing down on the bottom right. This is no ordinary party hat, it is made entirely of expensive cloth carefully hand stitched together. The man whose hat this is, when he gets up later will have to decide what to do with the hat. He can’t just throw it away. Years from now it will be a prized possession of his children who will use it in all their games.

HAT 2: This is a brand new military hat just out of the box. You can see the box there at the bottom of the drawing. Those big military hat boxes are excellent for keeping all of your important papers and documents in.

HAT 3: This is a very expensive hat belonging to a wealthy stock broker in New York. This hat blew off of his head this morning and landed there in the gutter. Incidentally, you can see clearly that it is New York because the curb has the quarter round of shiny steel at the edge that you see on New York curbing. Well, even though the hat cost in excess of $100 dollars, the man did not run to fetch it back. Good thing he didn’t to because the moment he got to the office he concluded a stock deal for a quarter of a million dollars, which would have fallen through had he been two seconds late. As for the hat, a homeless man has it , and although it gets him big laughs, his manor is changing and he seems more thoughtful now.

HAT 4: This is a band leaders parade hat which only gets used once a year. It spends the rest of the time in a locker in a high school hallway in upstate New York.

HAT 5: This hat belongs to a very beautiful young woman going to Vassar college. She is going to wear it today with that top that you can see there in the dresser drawer. Let me tell you what kind of a woman she is. Every day, in the afternoon, she draws a little sketch of what she is going to wear the next day in the borders of her school notebook. These little sketches are so good that you would think she would be studying fashion design, but she is studying physics.

HAT 6 This looks like a baseball cap but its long brim makes it a hunting cap. It was purchased by a man from a mail order catalog. He didn’t like it but the very day he got it and planned to return it, it got rained on and shrank terribly. Now he can’t return it, but it doesn’t matter because the dog is about to eat it. You can see in the drawing that the hat has been dragged down next to the dog’s food bowl. By the time you get to read this that hat will have ceased to exist.

Drawing, Roses by the Side of the Bed

Here are complete directions for doing a drawing of this type. Take a nice heavy weight piece of drawing paper and soak it in water till it expands, then, before it starts to dry out staple it around the edges to a piece of wood. Once it is dry give it a good two or three coats of gesso, and while the last coat is drying go for a walk in the woods and look for tin cans that are all rusted. Do not neglect this step or you won’t be able to put in the high-lights later when you are finishing the drawing. When you get back from the woods take the rusty tin cans, put them in a canvas bag and beat it with a hammer. Open the bag, throw away the cans, but save all the little rusty bits of metal that are in the bag like dust. Sprinkle the rusty metal bits on to the paper, which should be dry by now. Take a heavy metal roller, (a rolling pin will do however) and press these metal chips into the paper so they get embossed into the paper surface. After that brush the dust off the paper and throw it away, and rub the paper surface with a rag. The excess rust will color the paper a beautiful golden yellow color, just like pastel does.

Now it is time to draw, take a red or maroon wax pencil that goes well with the yellow of the paper, try and think of some good idea, and when you have one draw it onto the paper as good as you can. When you are done with that it is time to put in the highlights. Take a razor blade and where ever you want highlights scratch through the yellow iron oxide tint of the paper down to the white gesso underneath. This will give you the most wonderful precise little highlights, but don’t over do it, too many highlights ruin many a drawing.
And what is this drawing about, after all that? Is it about lost love like yesterday’s drawing? Is it about romance? Or is it about interior decoration? I can’t say right now maybe we’ll talk about it tomorrow.

Venice

Venice, it was ten long years since I had seen her last. How was I to know on that fateful day, ten years ago, that when we stepped onto the plane to go home, my life had changed, in every detail, from a major to a long minor chord, without explanation; forever and without resolution.

And now finally, I had returned alone—late at night so I was unable to see those familiar sights. I took the same room, with the same view and in the morning, very early, I opened the shutters and looked out upon the city. How am I to explain that strange sensation? A sensation of a type only experienced at best, two, perhaps three times in one lifetime.

It was that feeling of returning to yourself after a very long absence. That moment when you begin to do something extremely ordinary, characteristic of your own personality but practically forgotten during that long stretch of time during which you struggled to be someone else, for someone else.

You look at your duplicitous self, you want to apologize, but then you say, "It’s all right, I’ve forgiven you already, let’s just go out and get a cup of coffee, you and I, my friend.”

Richard Britell Housatonic, 2008

Drawing, Best Coffee I Ever Drank

This is a drawing of the corner store in the town of Housatonic on Route 183 in Western Massachusetts where I live. But nothing is as simple as all that, and I have to be more specific. It is a drawing of that corner store in the fading light of early evening, in the rain. The view is from inside a car, so the image is further obscured, and made more painterly, by the water on the windshield that has merged and blended all the forms together. The diagonal strokes at the bottom left and right are the marks of the windshield wipers going back and forth. This drawing has a very long title which I include here since it wouldn’t fit in the title box:
Full Title:
I was standing early in the morning with our rednecks in the village store having coffee. As usual they eyed me suspiciously and one of them said, apropos of nothing, “This is the best country.” I couldn’t but agree and addressing them all I said with conviction, “This is the best country. And this is the best state in this country. This is the best town in this state. With out a doubt this is the best and only store in this town. And this is the best coffee I ever drank!”

Drawing, Nude Combing her Hair and Petting the Cat

This nude figure is sitting on the bed, combing her hair and petting the cat with her foot. You may want to ask me why I decided to put an electric plug and a wire in my drawing. Was I because I wanted it to symbolize the power and life of the figure? No. Was it because I got my figure too far over to the right, and I needed something to balance the composition? No. It was because I wanted to be absolutely sure that in the future no one would attempt to pass my drawing off as an old master drawing done in the Renaissance. That is why I put the plug in the drawing. To make sure that it is a “modern” drawing.

This concern with being modern for me goes back to my student days when I was in art school. I had several old master drawings up on my wall and my mother, coming to visit, started looking at a Leonardo drawing and asked me, “When did you do this one, Dicky?” This question I dismissed at the time as coming from someone who knew nothing of art history. But it was impossible to dismiss it completely. My work was anachronistic. And it is still a factor in my drawing. Does my figure’s right arm look suspiciously like the right arm of Michelangelo’s Libyan Sibyl? Sticking in a Tide box is not going to solve this problem.