Charles Ritchie

Photograph of the artist at the window with his temporary painting table.

A Window on Philadelphia

The exhibition Prints by Gallery Artists is on view until 27 February at Gallery Joe in Philadelphia and three of my prints are included in the venue: Night II, and Water Tower and my accordion fold book, April 2008.  I’ve just returned from seeing the exhibition and highly recommend it.  As well as stepping back and seeing a few of my prints in a fresh context, I enjoyed studying the works of 16 other excellent artists hung in a salon style presentation:  Astrid Bowlby, Emily Brown, Lynne Clibanoff, Christine Hiebert, Marilyn Holsing, Jeanne Jaffe, Mary Judge, Sharon Louden, Winifred Lutz, Rob Matthews, Linn Meyers, Kate Moran, Stephen Robin, Samantha Simpson, Mark Sheinkman, Martin Wilner.  The installation is connected with the city-wide, season-long focus on contemporary printmaking titled Philografika.

In order to make it to the Gallery Joe opening, my family and I drove on Friday from our home just north of Washington DC, ahead of a massive snowstorm.  The light snow started just as the reception began and certainly didn’t dampen the opening crowd; at times I could hardly find a place to stand as the big crowd ebbed and flowed.  Over the course of the evening I got to meet and talk to quite a number of artists and visitors (see below).  After dinner, we retired to our hotel room as the snow and wind grew stronger and the blizzard began to roar into town.  Originally we had intended to visit some of the Philadelphia museums and galleries over the weekend, hoping to see some of the other Philographika venues, but when we woke, it was clear, most everything was closed that day.  So, I pulled my chair and table up to the small window of our hotel room three stories up.  As I gazed across I-95 and the Delaware River, the second largest snowstorm in Philadelphia history moved through.  Sitting in my comfortable quarters I witnessed twenty eight inches of snowfall before it was over.

It was a pleasure just to sit and look.  I saw wave after wave of snow blowing nearly horizontally past the window, at times the view nearly went white.  Dark settled slowly and the lamps came on. As the snowstorm faded, I was sorry to see it go.  I made only one drawing in my journal (see below).  I took no notes;  I didn’t have any noteworthy dreams that evening.  But I have no doubt that the peace and beauty I experienced in front of that window will fortify me for a long time to come.  Sometimes journaling is just looking; looking deeply.

Warmest thanks to Becky and Gil Kerlin, Jenny, and Sam.(Above) Philadelphia Blizzard. Sketch made Saturday 6 February 2010, watercolor, graphite, and pen and ink on Arches paper in bound volume, page 4 x 6″.

(Below) The artist at Gallery Joe discussing with visitors his accordion fold print project, April 2008 on view in the display case.
Photographs by Samantha Ritchie.

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.

(above) Charles Ritchie, Astronomical Chart, Bowl, and Candles, (work in progress), watercolor and graphite on Fabriano paper, 4 x 6″

Dreams and Images

I don’t have many recurring dreams, but one returned recently.  I’m looking across the solar system and the planets are right there; little worlds that I can stretch out and grasp, even reach down and touch their surfaces.  My eyes are telescopic; everything far is near and I see space warping around, bending the distant galaxies into my proximity.  This dream has reappeared to me in various forms over the years and it’s always exhilarating to experience it.

You might think I might want to try and draw my dreams, but I don’t.  The results are always disappointing.  I dream in black and white or very subtle color that is much the cast of my drawings, but my dreams are mostly vague, shifting, mental images that feel so different that what I manage to put on paper.  Perhaps film would be a better medium in which to construct surrogates for dream experiences. But even so, I’m not sure that rendering my dreams in any medium would be as pungent an art experience as someone might think.  Have you ever had someone tell you their dreams?  Most are pretty dull to an outsider.  I am absolutely content to write my dreams out each morning, and occasionally rewrite and rethink special ones on my drawings.  I believe dreams are symbol-filled missives from the subconscious that will reveal a great deal about my psyche if I study them closely.  But, my associative readings are probably opaque to most of those who would want to try and follow along.

Regarding the image above, it’s a work-in-progress, a composition sketched out in pencil with various areas articulated in watercolor.  The image is dominated by a 19th century astronomical chart that hangs in my studio (see online journal entry for 17 February 2008).  Begun in 2007, I started this particular drawing as a graphite composition, but my initial impetus for the idea cooled and I put the sheet away for a couple of years. A few nights ago, I walked into my studio and saw the cupboard with a different set of objects in a different light and pulled out the incomplete sheet and began again.  As the original drawing was developed only in pencil, it was easy to rework it into this new composition.  I proceed through my process intuitively, waiting for the right objects to unfold in the right context.   My efforts to arrange still life objects around the top of the chest are minimal as subjects naturally migrate through my workspace; the dining room the serves as studio and is very much a living space.  I prefer to just let the arrangements happen.  Perhaps one day if this drawing is successful I’ll look back when it’s over to speculate on why the subjects could have been significant to me at this point of my life.  I try not to think about it too much now.  Just act.

But returning to the subject of dreams; could the mysterious essence of my dreams filter their way into my drawings?  Perhaps there are parallel images in my surroundings that echo the mystery, atmosphere, and symbolist invention of dreams?  I’ve always thought this would be a very desirable possibility.

(above) Charles Ritchie, Study for Astronomical Chart, Bowl, and Candles, From Book 132, drawing dated 11 April 2009, watercolor, graphite, and pen and ink on Fabriano paper, page size: 4 x 6″