Charles Ritchie

Views of the World

For many years I’ve kept framed prints by Andreus Cellarius hanging at either side of my studio window. The engravings from his 1660 Harmonia Microcosmica are not rare, probably modern reprints of plates adapted from the volume.  The subjects fit well among the small group of astronomical charts hanging my studio and also bear a private significance.  As I sit looking out my window, the Ptolemaic theory, placing the earth at the center of the universe hangs to my left; while the Copernican theory depicting a Sun-centered universe is to my right.  I like being ensconced between these viewpoints; I believe my drawings are continually proposing options for viewing the world.

The photograph above shows the current state of my drawing window.  We recently decided to paint our house and the windows are first; most have never been properly prepared and coated.  The project involves removing everything in the vicinity of the windows, including my favorite drawing table.  I rarely do a thorough cleanup, so such a task is massive with piles and piles of materials, tools, letters, papers, and drawings to dig through.  The buildup is largely due to my reluctance to throw things away, leaning on the hope that everything can be used someday.  Yes, I’m resourceful and I do reuse lots of things, however I’ve collected far more material than I will ever be able to employ.

I learned many years ago that cleanup is an important component in the creative process.  The activity can be like paging through a journal where pieces of your life are reviewed, sorted, categorized, reclaimed or discarded.  In my cleanup, I am rediscovering a thousand ideas left unrealized; in particular abandoned works-in-progress that deserve a second chance.  I’ve found at least twenty sheets that I would like to rework.  The intervening years since developing these drawings have brought creative experience and can provide reinvigoration and insight.  In my piles I’ve also found many small sheets of drawing paper, torn to evocative sizes, some minimally worked, and these can also serve as catalysts if matched with the right idea.  In addition, I’ve found twelve drawings that I’ve categorized as not worth spending more time on; unredeemable at this point.  These I will put in a box, far out of mind, knowing perspective migrates over time.

In my piles I’ve uncovered tools, rulers, inks, paints, brushes; lots of supplies that may spark some new direction or augment a current project.  These materials I’ve sorted into jars.  Last but not least, two of my favorite postcards emerged from a stack of papers; displaced in the detritus.  These postcard images have never been far from my table over the years.  To me they stand as ideals for specific approaches to making art. The drawing by Leonardo DaVinci in the collection of the Royal Library, Windsor Castle, England, is a study for an equestrian monument and illustrates sensitivity to line. Leonardo weaves light layers of line before settling on the dominant elements to be emphasized. Note how transparency is retained allowing details such as the horse’s legs and head to be postulated into variable positions.  An oil study by Camille Corot from the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, England, is the second image and I deem it to be a perfect example of tonal painting.  The artist brushes fluidly, confidently, and precisely with an immediate and evocative effect. I particularly admire the restrained palette and how it sways between warm browns and cool blues. Leonardo and Corot’s inspiring images represent alternate views whose lessons I hope to absorb into my own practice.

Soon our house painting will be over.  I’ll be back at my table and hopefully all of the displacement will have realigned into more and different views of the world.Charles Ritchie, Dark Drawings at the Window, 2009 - (work in progress), graphite on Fabriano paper, 4 3/4″ x 9 1/16″.

(above) Charles Ritchie, sketch after an oil painting by Giorgio Morandi, watercolor and pen and ink on Fabriano paper, one panel from an uncatalogued accordion fold drawing dated 8 August 1987, panel size 4 x 6.”

Cadence

I admire artists like Giorgio Morandi, who draw energy from diligent, sustained questioning.  Morandi found a lifetime’s worth of investigation in a select group of motifs. His invention within the genres of still life and landscape relied on his ability to reduce subjects to an essence; engaging often incremental shifts in subject, lighting, palette, size, and format. The completion of each painting seemed to only rekindle a quest to find new ways to cultivate subtle variation and inflection.  I am reminded of poet E.E. Cummings’ quote “Always the beautiful answer that asks the more beautiful question.”

For me, it’s easy to see how Morandi could find his limitations freeing; he woke each morning prepared to paint the what, allowing him to jump ahead to the challenges of how.  Morandi’s oeuvre is filled with a cadence; a visual repetition of subjects in variation as well as the implied cadence of his own engagements. One of the most exciting images I have seen in years is from a recently published book of photographs by Gianni Berengo Gardin called Giorgio Morandi’s Studio.  The book lovingly visits Morandi’s studio/quarters in exquisite black and white images.  One shot features the tabletop on which Morandi arranged his still life subjects lifted to reveal the web of traced arcs and contours representing footprints of the many subjects that the artist arranged and rearranged on that table. The artist’s hand-drawn record of locations, beyond being a beautiful abstract image on its own, conveys echoes of Morandi’s cadence.

I’m attracted to other artists whose cadence is evident.  On Kawara makes paintings that feature the date of the work’s execution in large block letters across his canvas; he commits himself to finishing the painting by day’s end.  Other serial activities by the artist include sending postcards to acquaintances noting date, location, and the time he woke up; or telegrams stating simply ”I am still alive.” In another rigorous reflection of on existence, Roman Opalka has been executing the same painting since 1965; each canvas, called a detail, continues the linear painted sequence of numbers from 1 to an implied infinity. In a parallel meditation on time and change, he photographs himself beside the canvas at the end of each day.  Or consider artist, Tehching Hsieh who executed a rigorous series of performance projects each lasting a year.  These included punching a time clock every hour on the hour, living in a cage, or tying himself to another artist for that time period.

Each of the projects I have mentioned above document the passage of time and, to my mind, extend the notion of the journal. Regardless of how one leaves the imprint of one’s cadence, our endless numbered days are passing.  How can we document them?  Perhaps, Opalka has articulated it best; “the problem is that we are, and are about not to be.”

(above) Charles Ritchie, two page spread from Book 131 featuring sketches after oil paintings by Giorgio Morandi, watercolor, graphite, and pen and ink on Arches paper, March 2009, each page 4 x 6”.

Note: I tip my hat to several friends who have in recent months brought artists Roman Opalka and Tehching Hsieh to my attention.  My associates’ insights have informed this online journal entry.

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.