Charles Ritchie

A Hunt in the Forest

A few years ago I sifted through family photographs, hoping to find a trove of snapshots of the many houses where I lived as a child. After much searching, I was deeply disappointed; if we had taken pictures, most of them had disappeared.

Since that time, I’ve been actively collecting images that speak to me about my past, and continually surprised at how often I neglected to document key places. When every so often I uncover a snapshot as rich with connections as the one seen above, I’m thrilled. This photograph, recently pulled from a storage trunk by my wife Jenny, shows me seated at the worktable of my first real studio; the setting where my earliest successful drawings emerged.  This photo is the only one I know showing the full setting; the worktable and windows, as well as many of the reproductions of other artist’s work that I rotated across my bulletin boards; a constantly changing wall of inspirations.

The year is 1984 and the spot is a rented basement apartment in a Victorian home in upper northwest Washington, DC where I lived for several years.  My space was beautiful, a bit cavernous, but full of windows on the east side, and the view was eye level to the flower beds, I could watch up close as plants grew and the seasons changed.  A built-in table next to the windows served as a drawing station and the desk and bulletin board shone bright under makeshift lamps.  Under the table, just to my right, I can make out a few of my artist monographs, a tiny collection that has since swelled into a large library. The place was a perfect little heaven as I remember it now (see, for example, Window with Moon and Star, 1983).

It’s unclear why Jenny would have snapped the shutter while I unpacked a radio and fiddled with dials. But beyond my mundane distraction, I am surrounded by the subjects of my drawings of the period; there’s a still life with dried flowers set before a black velvet backdrop, shamrocks in flower pots; and a black ceramic teapot that predominated as a subject for a number of drawings during that period.  I look out the window, through the elaborate iron bars to see green trees of summer. Jenny and I had just married, honeymooned in England, and as we returned I began my curatorial career (see online journal entry for 15 June 2008).

The best clues to dating this photograph are in the images on the bulletin board.  I recognize some of the artists that were influencing me at the time; several Leonardo plant drawings, a Raphael figure drawing, an Albrecht Durer landscape, a Claude Lorrain pen and wash drawing; however the key reproduction for me is Paulo Uccello’s broad landscape, A Hunt in the Forest, c. 1465-70, pinned to the wall just above my head.  That large print was purchased at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England while we were traveling earlier in the summer (below, my 1984 journal sketch after A Hunt in the Forest).

I hadn’t thought about the Uccello painting in a while, so the photo motivated me to dig into my late 1984 journals where I discovered a sketch I made after the composition.  The Uccello work is a wonderful broad-format landscape and an inventive essay in linear perspective featuring hunters, horsemen, and dogs leaping across the foreground, and then shrinking in size, particularly at the center of the composition, to create the illusion of deep space.  It dawned on me that the format of the work and the focus on spatial recession relates to a drawing I was completing at the time, The Bend (below) (see also online journal entry for 17 August 2008).I now see that The Bend was probably done under the sway of Uccello. In addition, as I scrutinized my journal copy after the painting, I noticed a long format composition of my own on the facing page (below, sketch at top of sheet); presumably house lights seen through trees at night. 

This study reminded me of the long format of my Self-Portrait with Night series, drawings that would emerge in the following decade (one example from the series below).  Rediscovering A Hunt in the Forest adds another vantage point from which to view the paths I have taken.

A photograph, a remembered work of art, an image sketched and annotated, all are pieces of the puzzle; clues on the hunt for self in the forest of time and existence.

Charles Ritchie, Studies from Book32 / Winter 1984-1985, watercolor and pen and in on wove paper in bound volume, two page spread: 4 x 12″.

Charles Ritchie, three sequential states of Moon and House [work in progress], 2009, watercolor and graphite on Fabriano paper, 3 1/2 x 1 1/4″. States were imaged (left to right): 15 January, 17 January, 3 February.

Intuition and Intersection

Each November the dense foliage above our old neighborhood drops to reveal the celestial dome; as a result I’m much more likely to be in tune with the heavens in winter months. Several weeks ago I saw a waning moon hanging in twilight blue-black sky and since that moment I’ve been rolling that image around in my head, especially as I work at my studio window these early mornings. As is often the case, the memory became so persistent I began a drawing of the subject, responding not only to the image, but a casual event; as I dug through a pile of drawing paper, a very tiny piece appeared.  The sheet seemed like it was made for a tiny moon in a vertical format landscape.  Three stages of the drawing, which is still in progress, can be seen above.

It’s been said that Michelangelo studied the quarried marble, trying to see the figure to be carved in the material.  I can’t say that my discovery of the right sheet of paper for this moon image came about the same way Michelangelo recognized the stone for one of his sculptures; but I am intrigued by such mental leaps that associate image with material.  I can’t say that I understand it, but at the same time, I think that Michelangelo’s recognition of possibilities inherent in a particular stone was essential to the creation of the David; or in my own modest case, the association I made between the image I was carrying in my head with a particular size and format piece of paper.  For me, the reaction feels subconscious; I instantaneously know I’ve found a solution before I’ve thought about it consciously.

As I continued to muse on that waning moon, making sketches in my journal and sustaining a variety of drawings, I looked at my astronomical calendar and realized that my early morning drawing sessions were soon going to be joined by the red star Antares, (see my previous online journal entry for 19 January 2009); to me the star’s presence signals the impending movement towards spring.  As I waited for the moon to return to the same phase I had recorded in earlier sketches, Antares joined my morning sessions and I suddenly I realized that Antares and the moon were going to cross paths.  The moon occulted Antares on the 21st of January.  It surprised and delighted me that these subjects of my interest suddenly came together.  Somehow the event made me think more strongly than ever that alignment of certain forces and our alertness to those forces is the engine for intuition.

Charles Ritchie, page from Book 131, (lower left) sketch of Waning Moon and Antares seen on consecutive days, 20 and 21 January 2009, at 5:30 am, watercolor and graphite on Arches paper, 4 x 6″.

A few days ago I took a walk along a familiar park trail, stopping as I often do on a bridge over the creek.  Looking down into the water, I saw the reflection of a great sycamore tree hanging over the creek, its uppermost branches, inverted in the water, were bathed in the red light of sunset.  At first the image seemed like a strange deja vu, echoing how my day had been spent, drawing the branches of a large tree in one of my ongoing projects.  But then I started thinking about what this image might mean to my work, what trajectory it might take, what intersection might be ahead, and how my intuition might one day connect it to something at just the right moment.