Richardsons from Hounslow Heath

Ben Richardson ~ The Baltimore Sun

The tune is "Beautiful Dreamer", which my uncle was fond of playing on his fiddle. The media player controls are below. Thanks for visiting with the RICHARDSONs!

THE SUN
Monday, 20 July 1987
Section D
SCREEN PAINTINGS GET FILM TREATMENT
Documentary Focus is E. Baltimore art, by Jane A. Smith

Ben Richardson still curses when he remembers those chicken feathers flying through the air and landing on his paintings. It was one of the hazards of painting outdoors in East Baltimore back in the 1940s, when vendors plucked feathers from the chickens, turkeys, ducks and geese they hawked on the street. "One windy day I was painting on the pavement outside the East Lombard Street market and this old woman started plucking the damn chicken feathers. The feathers started flying all over, but the only place they seemed to land was on my screen. I had to keep picking them off", the 83-year-old man recounted last week. Because of those feathers, he built himself a little red one-room bungalow with lots of windows behind his Morrell Park row house, and it was in the privacy of that studio that Mr. Richardson churned out an average of 10 screen paintings a week over four decades. …. Last week, the film crew brought Mr. Richardson back to East Baltimore where he first started painting. They filmed him at American Joe’s Bar on South Luzerne Avenue. The artist made mark with brush and bow when he was 14. Trained by his father to be a brick mason, he soon found he preferred music and screen painting. Between pictures and playing engagements, he worked at various tasks, including the parking lot where he earned a reputation as the curmudgeon of cars, snapping impatiently at motorists unable to stay within their assigned yellow lines. "Either you know how to park or you don’t," he was quoted in a 1950s SUNPAPERS article as snarling at an unfortunate driver. "If you don’t, get offa my lot. This ain’t no shopping center." … Of Ben Richardson, (Elaine Eff, Baltimore ‘s Official Folklorist) said, "He is not a minor light in the screen painters’ hall of fame. He’s a major figure…. His most important contribution is that he passed on the skills. He taught others, and some of them are still painting."

~ A Neddy Creation ~