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) Photograph of drawing table with Landscape in Graphite II (work in progress) 5 x 12″, graphite on Fabriano paper.  This drawing has been executed in pencil and powdered graphite applied with brushes and water.  On the table can be seen a dish of powdered graphite (top center), various weight pencils, a bit of cut plastic eraser and graphite stick (far right), and a dish of water with index card (upper right) on which to mix and test the graphite solution before applying it to the drawing.

Drawing into Painting / Painting into Drawing

Over the winter I’ve engaged graphite as a drawing medium, building tone with pencils of various weights from 9H to 9B. I usually start the compositions with very hard lead pencils and then move to darker, softer lead.  Sometimes I move back and refine the areas of softer graphite using the harder leads, pressing the material into the surface of the paper.  As I develop my image, I tend to smooth out tone with a bit of plastic eraser which evens the surface and cultivates an atmosphere that unifies the composition (Window with Dark Drawing and Open Journal was created in this method).  In more recent experiments, I’ve set the eraser aside, and in doing so I’ve sensed a different kind of sparkle emerge from the drawing surface.  Perhaps more of the white paper shines through on a microscopic level when I refrain from smearing the graphite. And certainly crisper edges and details are possible without smearing.  In the end it’s probably learning when to smear and when not to smear with the eraser that is the real lesson from employing such a technique.  One key element I recognize is that graphite has provided me a springboard for returning to the study of value.  In my early drawings black watercolor was my essential medium for investigating light and dark relationships.  But in recent years I have employed alternate color-based ways of painting darks that have come to be more satisfying (see online journal entry for 4 May 2008).  Of course graphite is not black, but gray, and it is reflective, thus bringing me to another set of problems and possibilities in the study of value. An advantage to utilizing pencil is that I can build and refine tone precisely.  With watercolor, I’m not as fully in control of the medium.

In addition to working in pencil, I’ve resurrected a procedure for using graphite powder that I used with some frequency years ago.  Finely and evenly ground powder can be applied effectively with brush and water.  Some experimenting with mixture is needed to make the pigment stick to the paper. Mixing too much graphite into the water can leave excessive residue and when dry, the friable powder will dust off the paper without sticking. I’ve found that using a hard, finely sharpened pencil can press the dry graphite powder into the paper as I mentioned above.  The advantage to applying the graphite powder with brush and water is that the result has a washy, aleatory look which serves as and a nice counterbalance to the precise, highly-controlled, fine point pencil lines.  Brush application can also apply tone over large areas quickly.  One other experiment that I just beginning to explore is adding a bit of binder to the water and graphite. Gum arabic, the standard binder for watercolor can do this, but it only takes a little bit.  The problem with gum arabic is that it will give the surface a glossy finish that I find distracting if used in any significant amount.  This can be avoided by restricting the gum arabic to the tiniest amounts; not inherently a problem as very little is needed to make the graphite adhere.  It is just difficult to know how much gum arabic is being used as the fluid is transparent and very hard to see.  If there is too much, one generally feels a drag on the brush to some degree.  Note also that too much gum arabic will make it harder to scrub back into the dry surface.  The painted mixture essentially becomes graphite watercolor with its more strongly adherent qualities (see Study for Landscape in Graphite II which was executed in this technique).

The point of all of this technical discussion is that the drawn line and the painted tone can be used in concert effectively; the two approaches can have a nice flux. I find that brushed fields of wash can cover and fill tone quickly, lending atmosphere in the way pigments settle and investing the surface with a fresh look.  But such bravura can be superficial; a facade without depth.  Drawing and erasing back into areas such as this can return a structural base and essential details. It is a delicate dance, drawing into the painted areas and then painting back into the drawn areas.  I don’t hesitate to scrub out or erase as I find that trying to preserve one area of a work due to liking it too much can become an enemy.  And that is another advantage of using graphite; it’s meant to be subtracted.

While I love to investigate such technical issues, I keep in mind that these tools are in the service of expression; a means of digging deeper into the heart of a subject.

(Above) Landscape in Graphite II (work in progress) as of 12 April 2010.  The drawing will be set aside in this state.  I will return to it next fall when I can work in front of the subject under similar conditions.

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″