Benjamin Britt

Benjamin Franklin (Ben) Britt (1923–1996) was a figurative, surrealist and abstract painter, and art teacher.

His subjects were African American culture, religion and children, which he captured in oil and charcoals.

Britt signed his works “B.

Britt,” dotting the “i” with tiny round circles.

Benjamin Franklin Roundtree was born on May 4, 1923, in Winfall, North Carolina.

His parents changed their surname to Britt after being forced to flee from their home state to Philadelphia.

According to Britt’s son Stanford, the name change came about as follows: Britt’s father got into a fight with his white employer, hit him with a shovel and killed him.

The father went into hiding.

His mother’s white employer told her to use his last name and leave town, fearing that the Ku Klux Klan would come after the family.

When his family moved to Philadelphia, Britt was around six or seven years old.

In North Carolina, he was close to his mother’s father, a Baptist minister, who read Bible verses to him.

Several of Britt’s earliest paintings bear religious titles – “Yield Not,” “Wife of Lot,” “Prodigal Son.”

Britt grew up in North Philadelphia and attended Dobbins Technical High School where he met his future wife Marjorie who was studying to be a beautician (years later, he and his brother would build a beauty shop for her in the basement of their home).

Britt was taking classes in commercial art.

One of his teachers at Dobbins was artist Samuel Joseph Brown Jr. Britt graduated in 1943.

For two years, Britt served in the Coast Guard, traveling to France and England.

When he returned home, he studied at the Hussian School of Art (1947–1950), the Philadelphia College of Art (1951) and the Art Students League in New York (1952–1953).

Britt was a surrealist early in his career.

He was described as a “surrealist painter” in a 1951 news article about an exhibit by the Guild of Allied Arts at the Richard Allen Auditorium.

He was a member of a panel of artists who displayed their works and took questions from the audience.

He paints “intangibles – ideas and moods – ‘things which exist but cannot be handled,’ as he calls them,” noted one writer.

“His use of color depends on the concept or emotion which he is describing and range from monochromatic to multicolored.”

Britt could not live off his art alone, so he worked various jobs – including machinist and cab driver - while painting in his studio.

In 1963, he owned a blueprint business that he housed in a building where he displayed his artwork in a gallery in a front room.

He gave up the day jobs and started painting full time in 1963.

It had taken him 15 years to reach that milestone.

To pay the bills, he painted custom-made artwork for clients, sitting down with them over a cup of coffee to determine their tastes and attitudes, and even taking a look inside their homes and the wall where the painting will be hung.

He acknowledged to a reporter that it was not the traditional way to paint but it beat working an eight-hour job that he hated.

He was being practical and esthetic at the same time.

In between painting by commission, Britt created paintings that pleased him.

Those include surreal paintings and abstracts, as well as ones with a social commentary bent.

One such painting was “Soul Brothers,” which showed the heads of Black, Native American and white persons signifying that humans are inherently alike.

He usually got his ideas for his paintings from a passing figure or a fleeting sound – the little things that most people overlook.

Sometimes he might be working on one piece, get an idea, stop to start it on another canvas and come back to it later, he said.

As a result, he could be working on three or four pieces at a time.

He was happiest, he said, when he was at his easel.

“This is life to me and if I had to give it up I might as well give up living.”

In 1969, Britt was commissioned to paint a portrait of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to hang in Joseph Pennell Elementary School in Philadelphia.

“I wanted to do something unlike anything that had been painted of him before,” Britt said at the unveiling.

It depicted King as a minister and civil rights leader.