Charles 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″

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.

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″.