Charles Ritchie

Charles Ritchie after Bill Viola, graphite on Arches paper in bound volume, 4 x 6″. Sketch made from two photographic stills by Kira Perov from Three Women, a video project by Bill Viola.

Perhaps the artist working today I most admire is Bill Viola.

I was deeply moved by Viola’s retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum in 1998. While the artist’s installation/video projects often merge sophisticated devices such as high definition plasma screens and elaborately programmed projections, lighting, and audio; his art comes from the heart.

Many of his works are pungent, but one in particular has become a touchstone for me, The Sleep of Reason; the title an obvious reference to Francisco Goya.  The installation consists of an antique dresser set before one of the walls of an otherwise empty gallery.  On the dresser are a few items including a clock, lamp, and a small television bearing the image of someone sleeping.  Suddenly all of the lights drop from the room, and the walls from floor to ceiling fill with projections of the same moving image (I was witness to an agitated white owl flapping wings in a cacophony of deafening sound.)  Just as suddenly as they began, images and sound disappear and the dresser and lighted gallery return. Silence. The same event continues at random intervals. I felt I was diving into the subconscious; breaking through the veneer of reality and resurfacing each time

I heard Viola speak at the Smithsonian Art Museum a week or so ago.  As he stepped to the podium his notes spilled over the stage.  He quipped he had five hours worth of talk with him; considering all the paper, I believe him. He kept it to an hour and twenty minutes (thankfully). And although I wish he had talked more about specific works and his experiences making the pieces, I was riveted to what he was saying. Viola speaks from the deeply spiritual place his work emanates.

Viola’s presentation ended with a projected video entitled Three Women, one of his works I have not seen before.  It broke my heart.  The video opens to a gray curtain, subtly shifting. One senses fog being recorded on grainy film. Eventually three figures emerge, walking in slow motion towards the viewer.  It becomes apparent we are watching a mother and two daughters.  Suddenly the mother breaks through the curtain with a splash and into a world of color.  The viewer realizes the thin veil is an evenly flowing waterfall. The two daughters follow the mother through the falls one by one.  Each looks around and then they step back through the falls again. Turning away and fading back into the gray curtain.

Who are we? Where are we? Where are we going?  The biggest questions there are.  Viola rethinks them. And while my own journals, drawings, and prints follow a different program, I look to Bill Viola’s work as a model for the depths and spirit that art can contain in this often muddled and anti-spiritual contemporary life.

The Smithsonian has placed Viola’s lecture online here.  If one wishes to see the Three Women video, scroll out to 1:13:00.  While it is only a tiny facsimile, one does get the a sense of the magic in this work.

Photograph of studio table with plate 1 for the Accordion Print Project. Tools seen in the foreground include 1/2″ wide, and 1 1/2″ wide mezzotint rockers, scalpels, burnisher and dental tools. Image areas of the printing plate have been roughened and smoothed with these tools to hold varying amounts of ink when the plate is printed. Earlier impressions from the print project are visible (upper left) as is Book 130, the journal which contains the images that are being adapted. A mirror compensates for the reversal that occurs in the printing process.

New Print Project Part 6

When I am in the midst of a project it sometimes takes time to find my next step. I try to pull back a bit, be patient, and listen to the work.

Returning home in July after producing the printing plates for my Accordion Fold Print project at Center Street Studio, I hung the proofs on my studio walls and watched images out of the corner of my eye. I also kept the plates available on my tabletop for study. As time went on, I realized how much I liked the whiteground technique I had explored while working at the Center Street shop (see online journal entry for 23 July 2008). Without having much experience in the painting of whiteground, I had used it boldly, and while the effect I had achieved was a bit ragged and a little too loose at times, the overall feel was energetic and not far from the vigorous watercolor sketching that goes on in my journals. Finding a printmaking equivalent for my watercolor journal sketches seems like an intriguing goal.

However, as I kept looking at the trial prints over time, I realized there were several things that were not sitting well with me. First, I would have wanted more detail in the images. I had tried to articulate elements that had not materialized with the painted whiteground. Secondly, I wanted richer grays; the whiteground had tended toward strong contrasts, blacks and whites. The absence of detail and range of grays was due to my inexperience with the technique; the next time I work with whiteground at Jim’s shop I’ll try to stretching my abilities in this direction. But more than anything else, the blacks in the current proofs were not as rich and dark as I wanted. Mezzotint (see online journal entry for 24 August 2008), the intaglio process with which I have the most experience, can give a deeper, richer black than the black produced with the whiteground. I decided that the solution was to go back into the plates and augment them with mezzotint, working them by hand using a variety of tools, including mezzotint rockers, a scalpel, a burnisher, and small dental tools that works well for smoothing the low metal relief of the surface (see image above). The hand tools allow me to roughen and smooth the metal in selected areas, reworking and enriching surfaces that were previously cut by acid. With these tools I am able to bring out detail, create mid-tones (grays), and make the blacks denser.

The key to reworking is a ½ inch wide mezzotint rocker that I have become fairly adept at using. It allows me to do some very selective roughening of the copper plate. I can pit deep, parallel, serrated lines into the plate’s surface. These lines will hold a lot of velvety printing ink. I think of the areas I’m roughening not so much as fields of darkness, but more like areas of crosshatching. I use the mezzotint rocker to introduce hatching tones that define form; essentially drawing with the mezzotint tool.

I’ve spent more than a month rocking and burnishing (see photo above) and now it’s time to send the plates back to Jim at Center Street to be printed. I’ve been lookng at the physical surface of the plate and imagining what will translate, but you never know exactly what is present until it is inked and printed. In printmaking, one gives up control and allows other forces to introduce unpredictable changes. These forces can improve a work in a way that cannot be premeditated; or can turn a work into a disaster. Printmaking always carries risks and I’ve grown to love it for that. (To be continued)

Photograph of the installation of the exhibition From the Inside Looking Out: The Journals, Drawings and Prints of Charles Ritchie at the Gregg Musuem of Art & Design, North Carolina State University, Raleigh. Photograph by Matthew Gay.

Pictures at an Exhibition

Stepping into one’s solo exhibition can be revealing; especially if work that’s been out of mind for years is included. It’s strange enough seeing one’s art framed and under glass, or presented in display cases; a situation that denies the whole tactile experience of creating the work as well as displacing it from the studio in which it grew. The unfamiliar, freshly-painted white room, the rarefied lighting, and the uncluttered, surprising juxtaposition of works serves to make everything feel alien: what a great place for an artist to be.

As I spent time going through my exhibition in at North Carolina State University, several things struck me. I enjoyed reviewing some early drawings that haven’t been shown before. The group includes Window with Moon and Star and Worktable with Open Book, drawings from 1983. Both works feature the same subject, the table and window of an earlier studio. The tight pen drawing of the former was made by thinning inks and building up layers of line with a very fine point pen. This very precise drawing process took months. Compared with Worktable with Open Book, a much larger piece created using large brushes in loose watercolor wash on a watercolor block; this drawing was executed in probably a half hour. I’m fascinated that I was working with such variant methods at the same time. I think the tension of swinging between loose and tight approaches has been one of the elements that has kept painting interesting for me. I still vascillate between these poles when I work. I should also note that Window with Moon and Star seems to me to be a reflection on the 19th century British artists that I was vitally interested in the time, William Blake, Edward Calvert, and Samuel Palmer. All of whom became more familiar to me during the summer of 1984 on our honeymoon in England.

Another early work, The Bend, completed in the fall of 1984, (see my online journal entry for 17 August 2008), seemed to be a reflection on the period in which it was created. The year was a turning point of my life; I married, I began the move to my present studio, and my outside work shifted towards a curatorial career. Looking at the drawing, I felt as if the picture was a long jump; a leap across the dark space between the lights on the left and right of the composition. This kind of metaphor never occurs to me while I am working, but such associations emerge in hind sight. Perhaps I subconsciously scout such visual metaphors when I choose my subjects.

One of the discoveries I made looking at the show was that during the mid-to-late 1990s I was not drawing so much. There are few works from that period in this exhibition. During this period I began working with Jim Stroud at Center Street Studio making prints. Also at this time, I experimented with oil paint on gessoed board, an investigation that was never fully successful. During this diversion, I discovered that I like the versatility of working with paper and the quick drying time of watercolor.

Regarding the installation of the show; the journals seem particularly out of context when displayed in exhibitions. My books are utilitarian and when limited to a spread of two pages open in a display case they lose their functionality and serial richness. They are meant to be held in the hands and experienced as a sequence of pages. Of course, the alternative of giving up security within such a public setting seems far less palatable. I have found no better solution.

A final note; memories of the creation of the work can affect how one remembers it; such as remembering it bigger or smaller than it actually is. Ones hopes and dreams of what one wanted to achieve with with a work can also jade memory. Reacting to the inaccuracy of these mental images can often times spark the trajectory for a new journey when one steps back to contemplate in the setting of an exhibition.

Other installation photographs are below. Deepest thanks to the Gregg Museum of Art & Design at North Carolina State University, Raleigh for their beautiful presentation and particular thanks to Matthew Gay who documented the show with these images.