Charles Ritchie

Self-Portrait with Night XI: Graphite, first state of drawing as it looked on 26 March 2007.
Graphite on Fabriano paper, sheet size: 5 5/8 x 12″

My studio hours begin well before sunrise. While sitting at my window in late winter, I can see Antares, the brightest star in the constellation Scorpius, rise ahead of the sun. Deep red in color, its procession toward the zenith means that spring is coming. When Antares becomes centered in my morning window and finally obscured by foliage I put away my current group of drawings and I won’t pick them up again until the leafless landscape reappears in late November. Self-Portrait with Night XI: Graphite (link shows second state of drawing as it looked on 24 January 2008) is among my current investigations. The drawing was begun in December 2006, was put away for the summer of 2007 and returned to my focus last fall. The images seen above and below represent stages of the drawing almost a year apart. I’m content with slow growth. In this drawing I am learning how to use graphite as a tonal medium rather than as an outline for watercolor as I have used it in the past. Building graphite in layers using a eraser coated in graphite to smear and burnish is unlike anything I have done before. I may finish the work this season or I could put it away for another year. Drawing in cycles asks me to lose something and forget all of the things I was thinking about it. When I rediscover winter drawings after six months of summer I return with new experience. Seeing a drawing after an extended break is a real spark. Like the surprise of finding Antares in the window once again.

Self-Portrait with Night XI: Graphite, third state of drawing as it looked on 22 February 2008. Graphite on Fabriano paper, sheet size: 5 5/8 x 12″

Figure 1. Digital photograph of the north wall of the artist’s studio displaying a Celestial Map plotted and drawn by David W. Teske in 1972. Note that the astronomical illustrations have been added to the sides of the map, echoing the panel arrangements in maps pictured in Vermeer paintings.

Astronomical charts hang in my studio. They often appear in my drawings as dark rectangular fields; like windows into some parallel night. For example, the one at center of my drawing Self-Portrait with Long Night is a large star map with hand-plotted points marking stars of different sizes on a deep indigo field (Figure 1). What a labor of love for the cartographer who marked the heavens by hand with 5,172 dots of light, noting brightness and inscribing beside each a reference number. Another chart that is seen in my drawing Daffodils with Astronomical Chart, dates to the mid 19th century and was originally used to teach astronomy (Figure 2). In it, comets and other celestial phenomena are reduced to striking minimal shapes in black and white. The engraved images are arranged in a grid, much like my night drawings pervade the grid of the window. Author Peter Turchi first drew my attention to the phrase “private astronomy”, once used to describe jazz musician Bix Beiderbecke who was seen “gazing off into his private astronomy, blowing something pretty.” The phrase seemed on the mark to me; I do feel I am a private astronomer mapping my way through the night. Watching the lights move and grow and die through the seasons and years. The maps that surround me echo my search that starts locally and stretches out into the night as far as one imagines.

Figure 2. Digital photograph of the west wall of the artist’s studio with two framed pages from the Atlas Designed to Illustrate Burritt’s Geography of the Heavens, Elijah H. Burritt, this edition published 1856.

above, Book 2, 1978, undated entry with notes taken on a night bus ride.
below, Book 129, Fall 2007 / Winter 2008, entries for 20-24 December 2007.

There was a time I thought my art might be leaving me. After undergraduate school I took a job as a graphic artist doing paste up for all sorts of uninteresting advertising projects. It was one of the lowest points of my life, working sixty hour weeks, making junk for a world that needed less of it. I knew I had to find a way to get my art back. A book was the answer. It was small. I could carry it anywhere. Even if I didn’t have enough drawing time I could manage to sketch a note or write a little bit. My book became a repository for whatever I wanted when I needed it. I began by recording the events of my life in my legible handwriting, carefully dating each page (see previous entry illustrating Book 1 1977-1978, entries 16-17 July 1977); but that bored me quickly. As an experiment I determined that I would record whatever words came into my head scribbling my train of thought with no edits, often illegibly (see Book 2 above) page after page; no dating, no clarifications. That path too seemed to narrow. Eventually my handwriting developed into tiny, private notations. I began to date my entries again, and started to include dreams as a way of tracking my subconscious. From noting the occasional stray dream the entries evolved into streams of multiple dreams per night; too many to write down at times (see Book 129 above). My journal developed out of a need to hold on to something that was very important to me; my art. I’ve held fast to it like a lifeline, and now, looking back, the thread connects me to who I was at every stage; a lifeline of another sort. My books will continue to change with me.

The artist sketching, summer 1977, a few months before commencing his journal series.

Study after Francisco Goya, Third of May 1808, watercolor and graphite on Arches paper in bound volume, 4 x 6″

I was in second grade when I noticed a book on the coffee table in our living room; Fifty Centuries of Art by Francis Henry Taylor. This was surely my first immersion into the strange, fantastic, beautiful, and sometimes disturbing world of fine art. I remember paging slowly until I discovered the works by Francisco Goya. At bottom left was an image that startled me; the Third of May, 1808. I wanted to look away, yet I couldn’t. Who is that man with his arms raised? Why are the soldiers shooting him? Who are these gunmen, I can’t see their faces? How horrible, the dead already piled in the foreground and those soon to die in the background! This was the stuff of nightmares; to a young child there is no difference between image and actual event. Eventually, I learned the historical fact that Napoleon’s troops had executed Madrid’s insurgents who rose up against them; but Goya relied largely upon his imagination when he painted this masterpiece seven years after the event. Goya had taken a rectangle of canvas and used techniques developed over the centuries; linear perspective, atmospheric perspective, sfumato, others; and had created an image that shook me, changed the shape of my brain, and shifted my world view by waging its potent magic. I looked at Goya’s work and wanted to learn that magic. I began there.

Link to image of Goya’s original oil painting, Third of May 1808.