If nearly half a century of screen painting has taught Ben Richardson anything it’s taught him about the Last Supper.
Richardson, 75, one of the oldest of this city’s screen painters, says he has painted the Last Supper on screen "at least three times that I can remember."
And he has always had to charge more for that kind of scene because it’s a tough one to do, he says.
"Yeah," says old Ben, sucking on his full-bent Meershaum pipe as he sits at the dining room table of his Morrell Park rowhouse, "you have to paint all the faces in on something like that, and all the disciples, and put food on the table. On one of the ones I did I even put a lace table cloth on the table."
Chroniclers in these parts will tell you that screen painting has been a pragmatic art in Baltimore since the late William Oktavec brought it here in 1912. Over the years, thousands of waterfalls and lush green, grassy scenes have shielded thousands of east Baltimore living rooms from thousands of nosy passers-by.
Ben Richardson, whose thick salt and pepper hair is pushed back from his forehead, isn’t the founder of a screen painter’s school or an innovator in the craft necessarily. To him screen painting was always an avocation.
Ben Richardson is simply a friendly old man with an artistic yen, plenty of memories and a great deal of pride in his work.
Nowadays he works in a pipe frame and plywood shed in his backyard.
He doesn’t advertise, but his yard and home reflect his artistic bent. He has painted bricks on concrete steps so they look like brick steps out front, has drawn fieldstone on a concrete walkway, and black and white stripes on a sapling in the backyard.
His front hedges are finely sculpted in teardrop and circular, plate-like shapes and his front screens are painted with a shaggy dog on the door and swans on a basement window.
Ben talks about screen painting with pride and a sense of time.
"I never clogged a hole up in a window screen," he said the other day. "I wouldn’t think of delivering a window screen with one single hole clogged up."
Keeping the holes unclogged allows the people inside a home to see out through the screen and permits the air to circulate the way it should. Clogged up holes can look like dead flies trapped in the screen, Ben says.
His first paid job as a screen painter was a tropical scene with a canoe on a river for the two swinging doors of a saloon down from the corner of Patterson Park and Eastern avenues. He had to draw the exact same canoe traveling in one direction on one door and in another on the other door, he says.
In the mid-1930’s Ben and his family lived at 314 S. Patterson Park Ave., near the park. The 15 years Ben and his family lived there were his most productive as a screen painter.
Back in those days, during the spring and summer months, he’d do nearly 20 screen paintings a week, he says.
Men and women would bring him pictures from calendars and from postcards of Polish cities and villages and ask him to duplicate the scenes on screens.
He figures he’s done thousands of paintings.
Ben practiced his screen painting while working as a salesman, bill collector and, in later years, a parking lot attendant for the Regal Shop, a clothing and furniture store.
Years ago Ben also played mandolin, tenor string banjo and violin for a hillbilly music group called the "Blue Ridge Rangers." The Rangers played for 4 ½ years at Slim Brow’s place, which used to be at 401 S. Conkling St., Ben says.
But it was screen painting that has been his main extracurricular pastime through life.
And always he has painted with his right hand, though the fingers on that hand were sheared off when he was 15 in an accident at a gas range factory. He still paints with his fingerless hand.
Last week he finished a front door screen of Christ knocking at the wooden door of a Formstone rowhouse. It was for a lady in Linthicum Heights and the drawing is pretty good. "She’s got Rip Van Winkle’s house on her back door," Ben said.
Ben has done historical subjects like the U.S.S. Constellation and the Shot Tower for the screens above the Midway Bar on The Block. The 8-foot-high screens cover Tattoo Charlie’s windows.
And Ben says he painted Judaic scenes, like the Wailing Wall and Rachael’s Tomb, for the partition that once separated men from women in a Park Heights Avenue synagogue.
Ben says that he can still drive through Highlandtown and see some of his old screens, still in windows, unfaded. It’s a source of pride for the old man.
"It makes me feel pretty good to see them still holding up," he says.
The photogaphs with the above article are entitled:
AT WORK: Ben Richardson starts on screen in his studio.
There is a photo of Ben with his meerschaum pipe, painting a screen, with a completed landscape nearby.THROUGH A SCREEN: Richardson and painted friend. Ben again with the pipe in his mouth, kneeling behind a painted screen of a big, shaggy dog, which the article describes as having been painted on the screen of his front door.
