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″.

Photograph of the artist’s journals, Book 123 through Book 132, 2004 - 2009.  The foreground journal is open to a study for Self-Portrait with Night: Pieced Panels I with the drawing in progress visible in the background.

New Work / New York

BravinLee programs, located in Manhattan’s Chelsea district, has opened an exhibition of my works on paper that includes twenty-three drawings, two prints, and eight journals.  Created within the last five years, this body of work in many ways summarizes ideas that have percolated through my recent oeuvre while endeavoring to push into new territories.

Fourteen drawings in the show relate to my Pages series, a project that emerged around 2002.  The images are executed on paper approximately the size my journal pages (4 x 6 inches) and are inscribed with notes that attend the drawing’s construction as well as dreams transposed from my journals (for an example, see Self-Portrait with Planets and Moon). Such texts spring from inner discourse that parallels my scrutiny of the visual world.  Multiple layers of writing may be erased and overwritten before the final inscriptions are inked.  Some observers might imagine these drawings are pages extracted from my notebooks and framed, however they are formed independently.  A sustained dialogue between these works and my sketchbooks is critical to their development and is evident in the journal sketches that are on view in the show’s display cases.

The Self-Portrait with Night series is represented with five works. These broad-format images are developed from a consistent viewpoint looking out of my studio window.  Set at night or twilight, refection and transparency are evoked to compositionally merge interior and exterior spaces. While my own visage haunts these works, it is often lost in shadow or swarms of overlapping detail.  In this exhibition, most of the Self-Portrait with Night works are bisected with a vertical crop or fold.  This gutter or fracture not only reiterates the grid underpinning my compositions but echoes the book form. Indeed, the format of these pictures is often identical to a spread of pages from my journal; for example see Folded Self-Portrait with Night I: Watercolor and Gouache.

Photograph of drawings laid out in preparation for framing, June 2009.

In recent years, I find myself delving deeper into color.  While I continue to emphasize flux between warm and cool tonalities, I find myself more in need of a full palette when I am painting.   Hues can appear subtly in underwashes of yellows, blues, and reds, or flare occasionally in pure color as in Three Inch Suite VII: Lamplight and House.  Simultaneously, I have expanded my use of graphite as a predominant medium. Folded Self-Portrait with Night II, Spring Twilight, and Night with Orion have been built up in this dry, silvery-gray medium over extended periods.  I should also mention extensive inked inscriptions on the latter two works, an experiment in which transcriptions of dreams are synchronous with the image.

Most of the drawings in the show were executed in my primary studio, seated in only a few locations using subtle shifts in viewpoint to reexamine the space or peer into adjacent rooms. (Works executed elsewhere are Blossoming Star Magnolia and Folded Self-Portrait with Night III, both created in upstairs studio windows). I continue to cultivate astronomical themes by including star maps and astronomical charts in my settings, and in recent months I have reinforced the motif by replacing previous chandelier ornaments with models of the planets.  I have also begun to introduce lamps with a variety of different wattage and vary their locations in the room as a means of creating a different kind of luminosity and reflection in my works. This experimentation has produced the abrupt illumination that occurs in such works as Astronomical Chart, Bowl, and Candles and Interior with Shadows.  Another new variation has been to introduce mirrors into some of my settings; for example, Self-Portrait with Planets includes a mirror on my drawing table as well as one leaning on the wall behind me.

Another new direction includes expanding interest in daylight subjects as represented by such works as Bright Afternoon and Spring Twilight. I endeavor to contemplate light in an equally penetrating manner as darkness. Using random scraps of paper found in the studio as support is another new strategy for experimentation; an example can be seen in Fragment: Spring I.  I have also begun to explore and refine compositions by adding pieces of paper; Self-Portrait with Night: Pieced Panels I had a section of the support filled in after the drawing had already been begun.  There are two prints on view, both investigating new directions; an impression of Night II in which detail has been articulated by scratching and painting on the impression, and April 2008, the accordion fold book printed in intaglio that is based on a transcribed sequence of pages from one of my journals. Prints, as always, are published by Center Street Studio, Milton, Massachusetts.

A complete list of the works on view with images can be found in the exhibition catalogue online at the BravinLee programs site.  The Drawings section of my own website offers images as well.  Charles Ritchie: Books and Pages is on view at BravinLee programs at 526 West 26th Street, Suite 211, New York, New York and can be seen Tuesday through Saturday 10 am to 6 pm. The exhibition runs through 28 November 2009.

Deepest thanks to John Lee, Karin Bravin, Meredith Rosenberg, Jenny Ritchie, Samantha Ritchie, Becky Kerlin, James Stroud, Janine Wong, and Lauren van Haaften-Schick for their varied and essential support of this project.

Charles Ritchie at BravinLee programs, 24 October 2009.  Photograph by Samantha Ritchie.

Beach Walk, Part 1; Book 132 Pages 58 and 59.

Beach Walk, Part 2; Book 132 Pages 60 and 61.

During my summer retreat, I occasionally get up well before sunrise and walk down the beach with my journal.  Carrying a pencil in my right hand, I hold the book in my left; the pages are spread open with clamps and a very small booklight is attached that I can turn on and off as needed.  Occasionally I stop to make a rough outline of something of interest, letting the pages evolve intuitively; roughing out several potential compositions across the spread of pages before I move to the next.  These spare graphite notes are occasionally augmented with written abbreviations: “y” for yellow, “r” for red, “b” for blue, etc. as a jog for my memory when I later fill in color and tone back in the studio.

My most memorable walk this summer began at 4:15 am when I slipped barefoot down the street to a black ocean.  It was low tide and the beach broad and I was completely alone.  The moonless night heightened brilliance of the stars. I immediately recognized Orion and the attendant stretch of bright constellations that prefigure winter rising out of the water ahead of me. The brightest star among them, Sirius was low to the horizon.  Just to the north, lights of the pier flickered in agitated water.  I knew Hurricane Bill was offshore, but too far out to make much of a difference yet.

As I meandered up the strand, in and out of the edge of the waves, I eventually escaped the lights of the pier and began to note the subtle variations of lighting from the unseen streetlamps as they cut across the mostly darkened beach houses far behind the dunes.  Cumulus clouds swept the rooftops, low enough to catch and reflect a little light from the beach town below.  As I looked toward the water, Venus rose and as it gained altitude I saw the brilliant planet occasionally reflected in the water at the surf’s edge.  Before long, the first sign of the approaching day, a great black cloud stuck out of the distant ocean horizon, a silhouette against the deepest blue imaginable.  My turnaround point, the north end of the island, slowly emerged from the darkness and I began to make out other subtly shaded cloud forms.  During my trek, three Perseid meteors streaked the sky; one was extremely bright.  Light incrementally permeated the thick air as I returned home.

Usually I return from my walks and sit down immediately before my watercolor box and brushes and fill in before the memory slips away.  This time I allowed myself to fill in the color over a period of weeks. I worked many of the drawings on the four pages at the same time.  Putting in layers of wash occasionally, letting them dry for several days before I put in another.  Are these the colors I saw?  Are the forms I conjured equivalents for the shapes of clouds or houses or waves I saw?  Probably not.  Over the long stretch while I painted these pages, my memories sifted essentials, stripping unnecessary detail.  In doing so, my play with color became as much about invention as depiction. What is important to me in this exercise is that I attempted to construct a convincing atmosphere; a surrogate for a sequence of events that was not so much documented as imagined.

Note: The sketchbook pages presented above are watercolor and graphite on Arches paper in a bound volume and the spread of open pages measures approximately 4 x 12″ each.

A Mix

I will soon have to put away my landscape drawings. Tiny red, green, and white buds now cloud my window as bare winter topography fills in and a leafy view evolves toward a different set of drawing challenges for spring and summer.  I am committed to making my art directly from my subjects; photographs and sketches just aren’t enough for me, so I follow the dictates of the season and have come to enjoy turning over drawings with the calendar.  If I don’t finish these winter drawings, I will bring them back out again next November.

Before I switch to the next batch of drawings in mid-April, I have my eye on finishing several pieces, but I won’t force closure.  One way I do this is by rotating a mixture of drawings across the worktable, keeping many elements in flux so that I can‘t develop an attachment to a single work, nor get too involved with the inevitable stumbling blocks that arise within particular pieces.  When I’m getting stuck, I move to the next work, not stopping to think much about my difficulties.  Often, upon returning to that drawing, I find the blockage has evaporated, and I can see the image more clearly due to of the distance and experience I have placed between myself and the perceived entanglement.  Regardless, I always ramp up the energy before disengaging at season’s end.

One current drawing has been a particularly interesting challenge (image above).  Created on the same paper that I use in my journals, a 90 pound hot press Arches watercolor paper, the support is thinner than the 140 pound Fabriano hot press paper that I commonly use for drawings outside my journals.  On such lightweight paper, the heavily worked surface undulates, as if it were vellum or thin leather (this relief is probably best visible in the photograph at top of this entry). I like such topography, bringing attention to the drawing’s quality as an object, not just as an illusory window into another world (perhaps that’s why I’m attracted to the physicality of books.) I’ve been inclined to title this series Spreads, since the drawings have a central fold and echo the format and size of the two-page spread of my open journal.  However I’ve also leaned towards continuing the Folded Self-Portrait with Night designation, as it fits the works equally well.  I’ll float these working titles and perhaps I’ll wait until I finish before deciding.

I’m trying a fresh experiment with media in this work as well.  I’ve wanted to push some of my graphite drawings into a darker value range and I have pulled together a mix of three materials that are helping me do this.  The three porcelain dishes pictured in the photograph at the top of the page contain (left) Winsor and Newton Lamp Black watercolor, (center) powdered graphite made from sharpening pencils on a sanding block, and (right) Daniel Smith Graphite Gray watercolor.  I have found that by dipping a fine point sable brush in water and painting with various mixtures of the three, I can edge the silvery graphite, towards black.  The drawing was first layered heavily with graphite pencil and then painted.  I’ve found that I can articulate crisp detail in a different way than with pencil alone.  It has been an interesting techinical development and this approach is starting to spill into other graphite drawings that I’ve been sustaining, including Night with Orion (see image below).

Speaking of my Night with Orion drawing; I have to mention a photograph I’ve discovered in the April issue of Sky and Telescope magazine, an image that keeps ringing in my head like a song.  It’s a composite digital image of a region of the night sky called the Orion-Eridanus Superbubble; the picture shows the expansion of gas from exploding stars in a 40-hour plus composite of digital exposures taken from a suburban backyard.  The image is stunning. There’s something about what we cannot see, what lies beneath the surface of things that haunts me about this photograph.  It’s as if suddenly I could stand in my backyard and see our galaxy in brilliantly articulated detail.  I’ve printed out this photograph and leaned it against a studio shelf, occasionally glancing at it as I move through my studio hours.  I’m not trying to copy from the photo; it is just in the back of my consciousness.  Is the image an influence?  Absolutely.  I would like to offer viewers such a glimpse of the invisible in my work. (More about the photograph here.)

Images: (top) Photograph of worktable, 11 March 2009, featuring drawing materials and work in progress.

(center) Folded Self-Portrait with Night II [working title] (work in progress), graphite, watercolor, and pen and ink on Arches paper, 4 x 12″

(bottom) Night with Orion (work in progress), graphite, pen and ink, and watercolor on Fabriano paper, 11 1/4 x 15″

Note: For those interested in aligning the superbubble image with the night sky, another composite photograph on page 70 of April 2009 issue of Sky and Telescope shows the photograph and how it corresponds to the stars of Orion; for example Orion’s head is at the ball-shaped formation in the center of the photo and the three stars of his belt can be discerned a step directly below.  The magazine image also orients the subject as it might be seen in the context of a suburban backyard at night.