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.

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, sketch after an oil painting by Giorgio Morandi, watercolor and pen and ink on Fabriano paper, one panel from an uncatalogued accordion fold drawing dated 8 August 1987, panel size 4 x 6.”

Cadence

I admire artists like Giorgio Morandi, who draw energy from diligent, sustained questioning.  Morandi found a lifetime’s worth of investigation in a select group of motifs. His invention within the genres of still life and landscape relied on his ability to reduce subjects to an essence; engaging often incremental shifts in subject, lighting, palette, size, and format. The completion of each painting seemed to only rekindle a quest to find new ways to cultivate subtle variation and inflection.  I am reminded of poet E.E. Cummings’ quote “Always the beautiful answer that asks the more beautiful question.”

For me, it’s easy to see how Morandi could find his limitations freeing; he woke each morning prepared to paint the what, allowing him to jump ahead to the challenges of how.  Morandi’s oeuvre is filled with a cadence; a visual repetition of subjects in variation as well as the implied cadence of his own engagements. One of the most exciting images I have seen in years is from a recently published book of photographs by Gianni Berengo Gardin called Giorgio Morandi’s Studio.  The book lovingly visits Morandi’s studio/quarters in exquisite black and white images.  One shot features the tabletop on which Morandi arranged his still life subjects lifted to reveal the web of traced arcs and contours representing footprints of the many subjects that the artist arranged and rearranged on that table. The artist’s hand-drawn record of locations, beyond being a beautiful abstract image on its own, conveys echoes of Morandi’s cadence.

I’m attracted to other artists whose cadence is evident.  On Kawara makes paintings that feature the date of the work’s execution in large block letters across his canvas; he commits himself to finishing the painting by day’s end.  Other serial activities by the artist include sending postcards to acquaintances noting date, location, and the time he woke up; or telegrams stating simply ”I am still alive.” In another rigorous reflection of on existence, Roman Opalka has been executing the same painting since 1965; each canvas, called a detail, continues the linear painted sequence of numbers from 1 to an implied infinity. In a parallel meditation on time and change, he photographs himself beside the canvas at the end of each day.  Or consider artist, Tehching Hsieh who executed a rigorous series of performance projects each lasting a year.  These included punching a time clock every hour on the hour, living in a cage, or tying himself to another artist for that time period.

Each of the projects I have mentioned above document the passage of time and, to my mind, extend the notion of the journal. Regardless of how one leaves the imprint of one’s cadence, our endless numbered days are passing.  How can we document them?  Perhaps, Opalka has articulated it best; “the problem is that we are, and are about not to be.”

(above) Charles Ritchie, two page spread from Book 131 featuring sketches after oil paintings by Giorgio Morandi, watercolor, graphite, and pen and ink on Arches paper, March 2009, each page 4 x 6”.

Note: I tip my hat to several friends who have in recent months brought artists Roman Opalka and Tehching Hsieh to my attention.  My associates’ insights have informed this online journal entry.

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″.