Charles Ritchie

Note: The following discussion is adapted from correspondence with composer Roger Reynolds, whose music I admire.  I thank Roger for his interest in my art and for his engaging questions.

Q: How does your writing function?  Is it an expressive act more than a literally ‘communicative’ act, so that it would not matter if it were intelligible to others, or even to yourself?

A: I try to keep my script legible, at least to myself. There was a brief period during the earliest years of my journal keeping in which I wrote without concern for reading what I had written.  I considered the exercise a strategy for breaking my ways of note taking that felt restrictive at the time (see online journal entry for 10 February 2008.) As my notehand evolved, it developed into a tool for inscribing thoughts quickly, compactly, and privately.  At the speed I write, occasionally I’ll slip into an unreadable passage.  I would prefer it otherwise.  However, I do think of the writing as abstract form. It is certainly a practice of miniature gestures that is completely outside the purpose of composing language; a kind of drawing practice. Sustained discipline is required to write in this way. In order to keep the rows of script parallel I balance the side of my hand along the lower edge of the paper working my way down the sheet incrementally from line to line. In a design sense, I’m also conscious of the page and the placement of my writing in relation to images even though the pictures and text rarely describe each other.  In the end, I write primarily to record ideas and I endeavor to make the writing comprehensible to myself.

In my early journals I attempted to track my train of thought.  With this exercise I intended to train myself to follow the words that came into my head as much as possible.  These thoughts were often notes about my projects as they developed. However, my books have grown with me over the years, reflecting my abilities and interests, and my writing has become almost solely about recording dreams. I have cultivated my ability to remember these elusive phenomena and it has paid off  (see on line journal entry for 25 December 2007.) My motive for dream recording is to keep in touch with my subconscious as manifested in dream symbols.  When I transcribe my dreams, it is almost like taking dictation.  This approach seems far more direct in its ability to show me what is going on beneath my surface than the rambling train of thought I scribed during my early years of journaling.  I can’t make this dream stuff up.  I may shape dreams into words and verbally describe the images and feelings that accompany them, but I have no control of the content.  I like that.

I don’t draw my dreams, although you might think I would want to.  I have often imagined film would make the best visual adaptations of dreams as it is a more temporally structured medium.  Writing down my dreams is perfectly effective for my purposes.  And when the texts are placed alongside my drawings in the context of my notebook, the two threads become parallel perspectives coursing through my life.  They rarely touch and give alternate vistas of who I am and how I live.

Q: What are you thinking about when you are writing?

A: Beyond my efforts to put the dream experience into words, there are numerous tracks of awareness that shift in and out of focus.  The first thing I do when I wake is look over a small spiral bound book that I keep at my bedside. If I’ve managed to put down some dream notes overnight, I’m hoping that deciphering a few key words will trigger a clearer memory of the dream. As the notes are often written in a drowsy blur, they lean towards illegibility.  Sometimes I can bring back the essences of the dream using the notes.  Sometimes I can’t.  I usually reserve the first part of my early morning studio hours for my writing process. I am usually sitting at my table in front of the window and waking up; becoming aware of my surroundings.  I am beginning to observe my subjects and occasionally I may break into quick watercolor study of something I notice that I want to get down in my journal.  I am also distracted with chores; making coffee, feeding the cat, remembering the things I have to get done in the day ahead.  These things can sometimes derail remembering the dream.  Sometimes I pick up my guitar and run through a section of a song I’m trying to learn or stop to review my current crop of drawings, trying to decide which I will work on during the coming drawing session. A bit of maintenance on the Rapidograph pen that I use to write in my journal can also cause a detour; it’s hard to keep the thin points working well.  The written dream often takes shape slowly, and as the writing process continues, I begin to decipher what associations may be in the symbols appearing in my dream.  I find there is almost always some connection between the feeling of the dream and the way I feel about some situation somewhere in my life. The dreams mirror my true feelings about things.  They can often be unsettling because I know their essence is speaking the truth.

From the above description it’s obvious that the process of inscribing my dreams is rarely the steady plotting of narrative in my journal.  I spread myself out while I’m writing; my attention is in flux and tied to my intuition.  This flow of focus is a useful part of the creative process.  I’m convinced that all of the various inputs listed above (and many others) shade my language and influence the drift of my writing.  I know transcriptions of my dreams can never be exact replications. My imagination intersects with everyday events; with reality.  The resulting composition written in my journal is a picture of me at a certain fragment in time.  And vice versa, I think my dreams and writing process shade the drawings as I begin work in my studio session.  It’s hard to say exactly why, but I feel the gossamer threads of the dreams permeate and weave the drawings together.  As I begin to draw, I still have the dreams on my mind.  Sometimes stray fragments of dreams percolate into my consciousness; I’ll lightly inscribe these on my drawing in pencil, preserving the remembrance for later transfer to journal. (see online journal entry for 14 May 2009.)

The artist writing in his journal 10 July 2010.  The pencil drawing is work in progress based on a postcard image of a painting by Caspar David Friedrich.

(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?