Charles Ritchie

Works in Progress

As I keep so many projects going at one time, I thought it might be rewarding to lay out my current crop of drawings-in-progress and review them together.  The photograph above juxtaposes two shots in order to encompass the nineteen works that were arranged on the tabletop.  All are in various stages of execution.  Some have been in process for many years.  Others are recently begun.  Some will take only months to finish while others will take years.  Others may never be finished.  Some may be erased and the pages resurrected as grounds for other images.   

In the foreground of the photographs are examples from my Pages series.  These drawings are created in the format of pages from my journal, 4 by 6 inches, but are created as independent drawings.  Most are temporarily adhered to mat board using double stick tape (3M #415).  The mounting keeps the works flat while I lay multiple watercolor washes into the page.  I remove the mounting after the work is completed.  The tape on the back of the drawing can usually be peeled away from the drawing with a sharp knife, like an Xacto.  Any residue from the double stick tape can be removed with a rubber cement pickup.  This process works best for small drawings; substantially larger sheets tend to buckle and can’t be efficiently held down in this manner.

At center left of the photograph on the right is one of my Self-Portrait with Night drawings in a fairly late stage of development.  Two other works from the Self-Portrait with Night series in relatively early stages are at upper left in the left photograph.  At center of the right photograph are two landscapes called Dream Panels; the left one is entitled Summer and the right one is Spring. There is not enough detail in the shots to show the bands of writing that run through the images of both of these works but a closer view of Spring is here.  Two sketches in graphite that have been executed on watercolor blocks are on the right side of the left photo.   In the upper right of the photo on the right is a graphite drawing I began around 1985.  I am still slowly working this one.  Who knows if it will ever be finished?  It seems to me to be more about the path than the destination.

One of the great advantages of simultaneously working with so many pieces is forgetting.  Works like these are kept in piles. After disappearing into stacks of work, I often recover the drawings to see them with fresh eyes and am able to bring to them new abilities that were honed during the intervening period.  My prejudices drop away.  I begin again.

Note: The group of work shown in the photo excludes a number of works in progress: my current journal, other lesser used notebooks, all prints and related studies, and my winter drawings-in-progress.  Only my summer group is shown above.

A Fragment

I was digging through my boxes when I stumbled upon a bit of drawing; a rectangular scrap about three inches wide and one inch tall. I turned the small fragment over and rotated it in various directions. The image, although unrecognizable, was highly finished, well-worked with black watercolor and clearly a torn from another drawing. I turned it around again and suddenly recognized it as a section I tore from a small piece entitled Tomatoes; a work that left my studio several years ago.

Looking through my journals of 1989, the period when Tomatoes was completed, studies show my attention telescoping towards the kitchen window as a subject (see the sequence of pen and watercolor sketchbook pages below). Eventually peripheral elements are discarded in favor of the tomatoes resting on the sill. At the same time, details of the landscape outside the window emerge as a counterbalancing feature of interest. But the elimination process was never completely worked out in sketches. The final composition did not arrive until I tore the upper inch of the drawing off; removing a bit of window and trees from the finished work.

Above left I have replaced the fragment in the position it occupied before being torn away. Above right is the final drawing with the upper section removed. This is just one of the more dramatic ways a composition becomes resolved. This is also a reason I prefer working on a paper support to canvas or panel. Paper tears. It is versatile. It is immediate. I also like the element of risk; it is hard to return to the original composition after it is gone.

Book 62

Book 63

Book 63

Note: The subject of Tomatoes is unusual for me; the image does not depict my home. For a period I had access to a Victorian house and I tried the new setting as a challenge.

See: Tomatoes, 1989, watercolor graphite, and pen and ink on Fabriano paper, 3 x 3″, private collection.

(above) Photograph of the artist copying in his journal at the Ashmolean Musuem, Oxford, England, June 1984.

Finding Forbears

In June of 1984 my wife, Jenny and I went to England for our honeymoon. We spent a week in London followed by a week driving around the country. We wanted to do something romantic and beautiful for the occasion, but neither of us are travelers so I look back now and imagine we were subconsciously homing in on spiritual forebears. On the trip, I certainly encountered artists who have changed the way I see the world who continue to inspire me with their achievements.

Sure, I liked John Constable’s landscapes before our trip, but when we stepped into an exhibition of his small studies at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, I was overwhelmed. Constable communicates a thrill in depicting his world, putting painterly bravura at the service of the humble and commonplace. At Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, I fell in love with Samuel Palmer’s work; I too wanted to invest a small page with mystery. Palmer’s varied mix of pen and ink and watercolor has informed my own drawing technique over the years. During the trip I also became aware of the work of John Martin whose command of scale is breathtaking. You may never feel as tiny as in front of one of Martin’s works. For example, his Creation of Light (see also below) convincingly evokes the immensity of the universe, juxtaposing human form with astronomical. What a master of light! The brightest point in the work is not the depicted sun, moon, or stars. It is the vaguely defined point just to the right of the sun; possibly a reflection off of a cloud bank? Who knows? Such is the imagination of John Martin.

(above) Book 130, Charles Ritchie after John Martin, Creation of Light, 2008, watercolor made from a reproduction of a mezzotint, illustration from John Milton, Paradise Lost. Published 1827.

One of the most resonant moments of the trip was our visit to Fountain’s Abbey in North Yorkshire whose ruins struck me as the greatest memento mori I had seen in my life. How do powerful cultures wither and leave these bones? I grasped the book in my pocket. Perhaps in my own way small way I seek to leave a skeleton of my life. My desire to organize my work around a linear series of journals is a satisfying conceptual framework, but it serves an emotional purpose as well. Through my own private memento mori I mark the passing, days, and months, and years; recognizing my mortality and attempting to come to terms with it.

(above) Photograph of the artist’s wife, Jenny, standing before Fountain’s Abbey, North Yorkshire, England, June 1984.

Charles Ritchie, Window with Moon and Star, 1983, watercolor and pen and ink on Fabriano paper, image: 4 1/4 x 2 3/4″, sheet: 4 1/4 x 2 3/4″, frame: 14 x 11″, private collection, 1983.1.5

Place to Be

I was standing in the record store but suddenly I was somewhere else. Two musical lines were weaving around me; a gentle male tenor twining a cello. I was no longer in staring into a vinyl record bin; I was seeing into the soul of the sky. The year was 1978 and I was being introduced to Nick Drake’s Cello Song; music that would haunt me the rest of my life.

When I hear the fading passages of Cello Song; Nick’s voice rhyming the strings, the thock of tabla and leaping bass with Nick’s acoustic guitar ringing time, I am transported back to that first musical audience. The memory is so clear and yet simultaneously so ineffable. I inhabit my memory of both the physical space where I stood listening and the emotional sky of my imagination. It is like waking from a dream and remembering the exact feeling and atmosphere, yet being utterly helpless to transcribe it. How do we capture that place to be?

Creating a work of art often feels like an effort to to do just that. I look at each page of my journal as a path back to a particular moment in my life. Clearly defined or diffuse, the entries are road markers evoking many levels of past experience. The written word, the image I’ve painted, even the page itself can trigger memories of the context in which I was writing. It is the same with any of my works. They are references to previous lives; real and fictive. For example, my drawing Window with Moon and Star was created in a earlier residence. I recall the boat kept in the next driveway, the reproductions of works of art I was displaying on the walls, the window plants I watered, the sound of the piano played in the room above me, the smell of the basement apartment where I lived. And many other obscure and tangential associations and dreams of the time. Viewers are welcome to find something for themselves in my art; but I make my work for me. I build a place to return, a place to be.

By the way, the recordings of Nick Drake are my desert island disks. Before his untimely death he recorded three major releases and some odds and ends; each work restlessly brilliant in its own way. The title Place to Be refers one of Nick’s most evocative songs. How far can one voice with an acoustic guitar take you? Nick nears the brink. For those interested, an enlightening book on Nick’s troubled life is Darker than the Deepest Sea: The Search for Nick Drake by Trevor Dann.

A final note, I deem Nick Drake an heir of English Romanticism; William Blake, Samuel Palmer, Edward Calvert, John Martin, John Constable; artists who have provided a deep well of inspiration for me. But that’s another journal entry.

Charles Ritchie, Book 24, Spring 1983, Studies for Window with Moon and Star. pen and ink and watercolor on wove paper in bound volume, sheet size: 6 x 4″