Journal: An Online Notebook Updated By The Artist
Posts related to Exhibitions
2010-02-09 11:36:13 | A Window on Philadelphia
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 ...Read More
2009-10-31 06:15:03 | New Work / New York
Photograph of the artist’s journals, Book 123 through Book 132, 2004 – 2009. The foreground journal is open to a study for Self-Portrait with Night: Pieced Panels I with the drawing in progress visible in the background. New Work / New York BravinLee programs, located in Manhattan’s Chelsea district, has opened an exhibition of my works on paper that includes twenty-three drawings, two prints, and eight journals. Created within the last five years, this body of work in many ways summarizes ideas that have percolated through my recent oeuvre while endeavoring to push into new territories. Fourteen drawings in the show relate to my Pages series, a project that emerged around 2002. The images are executed on paper approximately the size my journal pages (4 x 6 inches) and are inscribed with notes that attend the drawing’s construction as well as dreams transposed from my journals (for an example, see Self-Portrait with Planets and Moon). Such texts spring from inner discourse that parallels my scrutiny of the visual world. Multiple layers of writing may be erased and overwritten before the final inscriptions are inked. Some observers might imagine these drawings are pages extracted from my notebooks and framed, however they are formed independently. A sustained dialogue between these works and my sketchbooks is critical to their development and is evident in the journal sketches that are on view in the show’s display cases. The Self-Portrait with Night series is represented with five works. These broad-format images are developed from a consistent viewpoint looking out of my studio window. Set at night or twilight, refection and transparency are evoked to compositionally merge interior and exterior spaces. While my own visage haunts these works, it is of ...Read More
2008-11-11 07:20:20 | Thirty Years
Photograph of Gallery Joe, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, November 2008. Thirty Years Making art is difficult enough without expecting it to pay the bills. I was lucky and found a parallel art career as a curator that freed me to pursue my creative goals without pressure to produce. In my early years I didn’t show my art because I didn’t need or want to. Alexander Pope’s advice to Dr. Arbuthnot seemed reasonable to me: create your work and put it away for nine years. If you still like it after that period, go ahead and share it. Recommendations like this, rarely taken in our age, may seem over the top. But the idea of distance providing clarity appeals to me and I was in no hurry. I just wanted to do the best work I could. Early on I began to store my works in a box. I found it useful to hold onto the original drawings as references when I serially examined my subjects. Thus, for many years I didn’t want to sell my work because it was counterproductive to developing my art. The arrival of digital scanning and printing helped ease me away from this attitude. Being able to print out a good quality ink jet print may not be a perfect substitute for having the work itself, but it is far more effective than relying on color slides, a recording format I struggled with for many years but loathed. But the greatest advantage of retaining works is that my I had built up holdings before I began to exhibit. That is why a current exhibition at Gallery Joe in Philadelphia can present a thirty year career view. I am not certain what made me change my mind about showing, but after testing the waters in various competitions and group venues in the early 1990s, I began to look forward to the audience and potential feedback. I also liked seeing what I had created outside th ...Read More
2008-09-05 06:13:59 | Pictures at an Exhibition
Photograph of the installation of the exhibition From the Inside Looking Out: The Journals, Drawings and Prints of Charles Ritchie at the Gregg Musuem of Art & Design, North Carolina State University, Raleigh. Photograph by Matthew Gay. Pictures at an Exhibition Stepping into one’s solo exhibition can be revealing; especially if work that’s been out of mind for years is included. It’s strange enough seeing one’s art framed and under glass, or presented in display cases; a situation that denies the whole tactile experience of creating the work as well as displacing it from the studio in which it grew. The unfamiliar, freshly-painted white room, the rarefied lighting, and the uncluttered, surprising juxtaposition of works serves to make everything feel alien: what a great place for an artist to be. As I spent time going through my exhibition in at North Carolina State University, several things struck me. I enjoyed reviewing some early drawings that haven’t been shown before. The group includes Window with Moon and Star and Worktable with Open Book, drawings from 1983. Both works feature the same subject, the table and window of an earlier studio. The tight pen drawing of the former was made by thinning inks and building up layers of line with a very fine point pen. This very precise drawing process took months. Compared with Worktable with Open Book, a much larger piece created using large brushes in loose watercolor wash on a watercolor block; this drawing was executed in probably a half hour. I’m fascinated that I was working with such variant methods at the same time. I think the tension of swinging between loose and tight approaches has been one of the elements that has kept painting interesting for me. I still vascillate between these poles when I work ...Read More