Journal: An Online Notebook Updated By The Artist
Video Walkthrough of Dust and Shade: Drawings by Charles Ritchie Exhibition
Posted Monday, October 17th, 2011 at 10:20AM (permalink)
A Saturday morning visit to Philadelphia afforded this six-minute look at drawings and journals in theGallery Joe installation (click arrow).
Posted in Uncategorized
Dust and Shade: Drawings by Charles Ritchie
Posted Saturday, September 24th, 2011 at 9:13AM (permalink)
(above) Works in progress photographed in the artist’s studio before framing, July 2011. These drawings, now complete, are to be featured in the exhibition at Gallery Joe, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Fall 2011. For a discussion of the star map pictured, see journal entry for 17 February 2008.
Dust and Shade: Drawings by Charles Ritchie
In recent years I’ve gravitated towards the writings of Wallace Stevens. For me, unraveling Stevens’ poetry often requires many readings over extended periods. As with the best drawings and paintings whose secrets unfold slowly, I covet the instants when the obscurity flickers into legibility.
Not long ago I approached the end of one of Stevens’ great poems, An Ordinary Evening in New Haven. The final lines of the poem leapt at me, reviving sensations I experienced while making recent drawings. The following three lines are the poet’s words that struck home:
It is not in the premise that reality
Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses
A dust, a force that traverses a shade.
Graphite and conté crayon have become increasingly important for me as material, cultivated as a slow buildup of powdery shadings. Moreover, I’ve come to love their transitional effects; the shadowy granularity of conté crayon and the mercurial reflectivity of graphite. I often combine these friable media, using them in concert with other media as well. To my mind, Stevens attempts in his poem to arrest not only the fleeting effects of light and shadow, but stretches to grapple with the ineffability of reality itself. What a goal.
I adopted the phrase “dust and shade” as exhibition title and Stevens’ lines inspired the two paragraphs I prepared for the show:
“The drawings in this exhibition evolved in front of subjects I have studied for more than twenty five years. Passing time is reflected in changing motifs and through tracked inscriptions of dates and dreams. Lifelong projects underpin my work; a series of journals begun in 1977 now numbers 135 books. A drawing started in 1986, Landscape: Dust and Shade, continues.”
“Dust is the essential drawing medium. Whether painted as a wash, rubbed with powdery fingers, or drawn in hardened pencils, the shades of light and dark are dust veiling and revealing the image. Poet Wallace Stevens often sought to pinpoint the locus of reality: does it reside in the physical dust, the force of time, or the shadings of the imagination? My desire is to spend a lifetime before my subjects to try and see.”
Incidentally, Stevens, a devotee of classical literature, probably adapted elements of his verse from a much earlier poem by Francesco Petrarca, Soleasi Nel Mio Cor (She ruled in beauty o’er this heart of mine). In English, we know the source as Petrarch, the Italian poet who developed a sonnet form employed by Dante, Shakespeare, and many others.
We are but dust and shade.
Posted in Dante Petrarch Shakespeare Wallace Stevens
Charles Burchfield
Posted Monday, October 11th, 2010 at 10:13AM (permalink)
(Top and below) Charles Ritchie after a watercolor by Charles Burchfield, from an uncatalogued sketchbook, 1986, page size: 6 x 9", watercolor, graphite, and pen and ink on wove paper
Charles Burchfield is an artist I have uncovered slowly over the years. I first encountered his art while I was in my early 20s, just after undergraduate school. I discovered him in an out-of-print catalogue by Matthew Baigell (Charles Burchfield, Watson-Guptill, 1976); the book was remaindered and I bought it for a song. I still look at that book. One of my best buys ever. I've always been attracted to Burchfield's palette; those earthy, tones of the natural world. Burchfield's adeptness with line and his fearlessness with black also entranced me. I found a kindred spirit in the artist's love of using paper as a support. In truth, I personally prefer Burchfield's handling of watercolor on paper to his oil paintings on canvas. In my mind, the oils lack the vitality of his watercolors. But I tend to prefer works on paper, so I may just be showing my bias.
A friend recently used the term 'farmer of images' and I think it's an appropriate term for Burchfield in that his art is so tuned to the seasons, weather, and times of day. I also loved the way Burchfield added sheets of paper to extend compositions. His idea of reworking and reforming earlier compositions seems so powerful to me; stretching the development of a watercolor across decades. It demonstrates that a work of art can include the evidence of an artist's growth over a lifetime. I think Burchfield's works have influenced me in all the things I've mentioned above. But I can't say that I've adapted any major element of Burchfield's vocabulary; for example, I certainly can't say that I have his love of dreaming up forms that carry a specific personal meaning; the artist invented forms that were supposed to evoke particular emotional states. However, Burchfield's rhapsodizing on the American landscape and interior is certainly an enthusiasm of mine.
Much later in life I learned that Burchfield kept a journal, when I discovered a book by J. Benjamin Townsend (Charles Burchfield's Journals: The Poetry of Place, 1993, State University of New York Press.) I can't say that I've read many of the artist's journal entries to this point, just enough to get a feel for his writing. The entries I've seen record daily events, natural phenomena, and recount the artist's emotional states. When I recently learned how many journals Burchfield actually kept over his lifetime I was floored; sixty-seven books containing around 10,000 pages. And I was very interested to discover that he tended to make the notebooks himself, in a wonderful informal way; paper folded and sewn together so simply. While all of this does have a connection to what I do, there is no way I can say that Burchfield's journals have influenced me. My journals began as sketchbooks and the image component has been the essential element. I have not seen any of Burchfield's journals that could be called sketchbooks although I understand there are occasional sketches and doodles in some of the journals. Burchfield also collaged and inserted pages at times, something I never do. I'm sure Burchfield tracked his dreams to some degree, but that is certainly not the focus of his journaling. Dreams are, of course, the core of my project as I use them to plumb my psychological depths, attempting to read the symbols. And I never try to consciously project these symbols into my art.
What I can say most attracted me to Burchfield was the way his pictures made the everyday world come alive; he charts the mystery that is all around him. And I find it in his work of every period, discovering the magic in the mundane no matter what style he employs. Many of the discussions I have read over the years regard Burchfield's middle period of work less important than his early work and late work. There is a tendency is to glorify the early modernist period where his forms were more invented and less traditionally depictive. Burchfield recovered his improvisational early language for his later work, and that work has been championed too. However, I've imagined that Burchfield was like Picasso. After a period of radical invention he needed to revisit a more traditional structure. Picasso, of course turned back to Classicism after stirring the avant-garde movement of Cubism. As for me, I am attracted to Picasso's classicism perhaps even more than his Cubist works.
Sincere thanks to artist and friend Emilie Keim who sparked this discussion about Charles Burchfield. You can see Emilie's art here.
Charles Ritchie sketch after a watercolor by Charles Burchfield, Book 134, 2010, page size:4 x 6", pen and ink on Arches paper.
Posted in Charles Burchfield Pablo Picasso
Writing: Part 1
Posted Tuesday, July 13th, 2010 at 10:23AM (permalink)
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.