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.

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.