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″

The Bend, 1984, watercolor, graphite, and pen and ink on Fabriano paper, 3 5/8 x 14 7/8″.

My journals are filled with watercolor studies that explore options for images I am creating outside of my books. For example, during the summer and fall of 1984, one of the independent works I developed was The Bend (above), an image of a road set in a long format composition. Books 30 and 31 (below) contain studies that establish compositional details as well as offer various solutions for the borders of that work. While a long rectangle with a gently arched top was selected for the final composition, the books show that other configurations were proposed; including a broad box shape with no arch. I was looking for a way to create visual interest by maximizing tension between the long, wavelike shape of the road and the arched top of the composition’s border. One of the wonderful things about keeping a journal is being able to go back and trace the development of an idea.

Book 30, Summer 1984, sheet: 4 1/4 x 6″, watercolor graphite, and pen and ink on wove paper in bound red linen volume

Book 31, Fall 1984, sheet: 4 1/4 x 6″, watercolor graphite, and pen and ink on wove paper in bound red linen volume

The Bend and the two journals presented here are among the 65 works on view in the exhibition From the Inside Looking Out: The Journals, Drawings and Prints of Charles Ritchie, on view at The Gregg Museum of Art & Design, North Carolina State University, Raleigh from 21 August to 8 October 2008.

(above) Photograph of the artist copying in his journal at the Ashmolean Musuem, Oxford, England, June 1984.

Finding Forbears

In June of 1984 my wife, Jenny and I went to England for our honeymoon. We spent a week in London followed by a week driving around the country. We wanted to do something romantic and beautiful for the occasion, but neither of us are travelers so I look back now and imagine we were subconsciously homing in on spiritual forebears. On the trip, I certainly encountered artists who have changed the way I see the world who continue to inspire me with their achievements.

Sure, I liked John Constable’s landscapes before our trip, but when we stepped into an exhibition of his small studies at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, I was overwhelmed. Constable communicates a thrill in depicting his world, putting painterly bravura at the service of the humble and commonplace. At Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, I fell in love with Samuel Palmer’s work; I too wanted to invest a small page with mystery. Palmer’s varied mix of pen and ink and watercolor has informed my own drawing technique over the years. During the trip I also became aware of the work of John Martin whose command of scale is breathtaking. You may never feel as tiny as in front of one of Martin’s works. For example, his Creation of Light (see also below) convincingly evokes the immensity of the universe, juxtaposing human form with astronomical. What a master of light! The brightest point in the work is not the depicted sun, moon, or stars. It is the vaguely defined point just to the right of the sun; possibly a reflection off of a cloud bank? Who knows? Such is the imagination of John Martin.

(above) Book 130, Charles Ritchie after John Martin, Creation of Light, 2008, watercolor made from a reproduction of a mezzotint, illustration from John Milton, Paradise Lost. Published 1827.

One of the most resonant moments of the trip was our visit to Fountain’s Abbey in North Yorkshire whose ruins struck me as the greatest memento mori I had seen in my life. How do powerful cultures wither and leave these bones? I grasped the book in my pocket. Perhaps in my own way small way I seek to leave a skeleton of my life. My desire to organize my work around a linear series of journals is a satisfying conceptual framework, but it serves an emotional purpose as well. Through my own private memento mori I mark the passing, days, and months, and years; recognizing my mortality and attempting to come to terms with it.

(above) Photograph of the artist’s wife, Jenny, standing before Fountain’s Abbey, North Yorkshire, England, June 1984.

above, Book 2, 1978, undated entry with notes taken on a night bus ride.
below, Book 129, Fall 2007 / Winter 2008, entries for 20-24 December 2007.

There was a time I thought my art might be leaving me. After undergraduate school I took a job as a graphic artist doing paste up for all sorts of uninteresting advertising projects. It was one of the lowest points of my life, working sixty hour weeks, making junk for a world that needed less of it. I knew I had to find a way to get my art back. A book was the answer. It was small. I could carry it anywhere. Even if I didn’t have enough drawing time I could manage to sketch a note or write a little bit. My book became a repository for whatever I wanted when I needed it. I began by recording the events of my life in my legible handwriting, carefully dating each page (see previous entry illustrating Book 1 1977-1978, entries 16-17 July 1977); but that bored me quickly. As an experiment I determined that I would record whatever words came into my head scribbling my train of thought with no edits, often illegibly (see Book 2 above) page after page; no dating, no clarifications. That path too seemed to narrow. Eventually my handwriting developed into tiny, private notations. I began to date my entries again, and started to include dreams as a way of tracking my subconscious. From noting the occasional stray dream the entries evolved into streams of multiple dreams per night; too many to write down at times (see Book 129 above). My journal developed out of a need to hold on to something that was very important to me; my art. I’ve held fast to it like a lifeline, and now, looking back, the thread connects me to who I was at every stage; a lifeline of another sort. My books will continue to change with me.

The artist sketching, summer 1977, a few months before commencing his journal series.

My first books were manufactured sketchbooks. Jenny, my wife, did not start making my journals until 1992. The early writing disappoints me. In hindsight I don’t like the poems I wrote and my prose seems very self-conscious as if I knew someone might read it. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that I realized that my dreams were accessible to me and a much more interesting way to log and explore life. The first drawings are of houses, often sketched from Polaroids or pinhole camera photographs I was making at the time. I rarely work from photographs now, prefering direct observation.

I began my journals begun thirty years ago today, 20 November 1977. The inside cover of this, my first book has an inscription in graphite by Jenny Lyle Ritchie, who was my girlfriend but later became my wife. I inscribed the first page using felt-tip pen, my preferred writing tool at the time, with a quote from artist Paul Klee: “Broadening the horizon: that by all means!” The four leaf clover was taped in the book by my great aunt Mary when we visited her in the summer of 1978.