Charles Ritchie

(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″

Self-Portrait with Planets II, state two, drawing in progress 7 August 2008, watercolor and graphite on Fabriano paper, 6 x 4″

Day Dreams

I’ve become interested in daydreams; flares of imagination that punctuate waking hours. We all do it; drift a bit and the mind is somewhere else. A few days ago I was dozing and an image floated up in my mind, three people were sitting in a car with a woman who was pointing to holes in her bare feet. I blinked. There was such matter-of-fact quality to the image, no sense of pain or alarm. What could it mean? A few days later I was sitting talking to a friend at the table and as we moved our heads, I felt I was seeing front and side views of his head simultaneously; he seemed cross-eyed for a split second. Not exactly a daydream, but a phenomenon representative of the slips in reality I like to note.

Perhaps my sustained recording and study of dreams has cultivated my awareness of such jags of the mind. Kin to dreams, I can’t help but scrutinize them in the same way, imagining some underlying truth about myself or my situation being revealed to me in their arcane symbols. In previous online entries I’ve talked about my method of recording my dreams as a means of self-scrutiny (see entry for 25 December 2007). I am convinced these daydream images are a similar nudge from my subconscious to look at myself from an alternate, previously unnoticed perspective.

I have begun to note these moments in my journal and I’m particularly encouraged by the momentum my writing has gained from incorporating these observations. The annotations have also begun to embellish my series of drawings called Pages (three states of one of the Pages are used as example above and below). Executed on sheets of paper the size of leaves in my journal, the Pages combine image and inscription tuning into my stream of consciousness. I especially prize dreams, daydreams, and slips of reality. As I make my notes and drawings I am often waking in the early morning studio, my script is often packed with such fleeting phenomena.

But the inscriptions also have a visual effect in the Pages series. Beginning as pencil notations, they parallel the drawing as it develops. As the graphite inscriptions fill the page, they are generally obliterated in the image-making process and as more space is needed for writing. I trace the mental process that attends the making of the drawing as well as scrutinize the act of drawing itself. To bring the drawing to a close, I usually pick a particularly pungent dream from the many I’ve had over the period that I worked on the piece. I transcribe it, returning to see if I can uncover further associations as I ink it on the page.

I like the fact that my journals and drawings continually change and evolve and I see this expansion of subject for my writing as another step along the way.

Self-Portrait with Planets II, state three, drawing in progress 15 October 2008, watercolor and graphite on Fabriano paper, 6 x 4″

Self-Portrait with Planets II, state four, drawing in progress 31 October 2008, watercolor and graphite on Fabriano paper, 6 x 4″

Book 130, Sketch of northern sky above illuminated towns, 7:20 pm, 27 February 2008.

Flying home from a trip this week I leaned my head against the window and drifted, blinking awake occasionally to see the light of the tumbling sun spread into pale rainbow bands above a plain of stratus clouds. I had been reading Jeff Warren’s recent book The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness, a fascinating study about the many levels of consciousness; not limited to waking and sleeping. I must have taken a subliminal cue from my reading because soon I was drifting into the afternoon with closed eyes. When I blinked awake it was darker. The sun had slipped further down and the color bands lifted higher. Another blink and I was gone. I awoke surprised by blackness. At first my disoriented eyes struggled to find anything. Then, out of the darkness emerged the Big Dipper (Ursa Major) balanced by winding stars of the Dragon (Draco). Below, the clouds were gone and I saw the patchy glow of several towns floating in the void. Words popped into my head, “This is where the dragon lives” the opening line of Wallace Stevens‘ poem The Auroras of Autumn. I had the strangest sensation; was I asleep or awake, was this dream or reality, imagined or real? Is this a dragon or is this air?

Blue Twilight, 1996-1997, graphite, watercolor, pastel, conté crayon, and litho crayon, 22 x 30″

Dreams are pure imagination. By transcribing them I attempt to give shape to what never really was. With painting I probe visual experience, uncertain and ephemeral. A favorite book, Le Grande Meaulnes by Henri Alain-Fournier recounts a young man’s search to return to a world he stumbled upon while lost in a wood. Deeply atmospheric passages follow his quest for the unattainable; for what might well have been a dream. This is what the chase of art feels like to me. I see a blue light and seek a path to it. But which blue light? What did I see? I conjure multiple observations; snippets of reality and imagination to link to a phantom past. Such is the setting of my drawing, Blue Twilight (above). My artistic practice is based on longing for a place I haven’t really known.

Study for Blue Twilight, journal entry dated 1 July 1995, watercolor, graphite, and pen and ink on Arches paper in bound volume, page size: 6 x 4 inches.