Journal: An Online Notebook Updated By The Artist
Posts related to Notes on Observing
2010-07-13 10:23:16 | Writing: Part 1
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. ...Read More
2010-06-07 03:59:22 | Views of the World
Views of the World For many years I've kept framed prints by Andreus Cellarius hanging at either side of my studio window. The engravings from his 1660 Harmonia Microcosmica are not rare, probably modern reprints of plates adapted from the volume. The subjects fit well among the small group of astronomical charts hanging my studio and also bear a private significance. As I sit looking out my window, the Ptolemaic theory, placing the earth at the center of the universe hangs to my left; while the Copernican theory depicting a Sun-centered universe is to my right. I like being ensconced between these viewpoints; I believe my drawings are continually proposing options for viewing the world. The photograph above shows the current state of my drawing window. We recently decided to paint our house and the windows are first; most have never been properly prepared and coated. The project involves removing everything in the vicinity of the windows, including my favorite drawing table. I rarely do a thorough cleanup, so such a task is massive with piles and piles of materials, tools, letters, papers, and drawings to dig through. The buildup is largely due to my reluctance to throw things away, leaning on the hope that everything can be used someday. Yes, I'm resourceful and I do reuse lots of things, however I've collected far more material than I will ever be able to employ. I learned many years ago that cleanup is an important component in the creative process. The activity can be like paging through a journal where pieces of your life are reviewed, sorted, categorized, reclaimed or discarded. In my cleanup, I am rediscovering a thousand ideas left unrealized; in particular abandoned works-in-progress that deserve a second chance. I've found at least twenty sheet ...Read More
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
2009-09-27 13:18:18 | Memory
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 th ...Read More
2009-05-14 02:08:57 | Dreams and Images
(above) Charles Ritchie, Astronomical Chart, Bowl, and Candles, (work in progress), watercolor and graphite on Fabriano paper, 4 x 6″ Dreams and Images I don’t have many recurring dreams, but one returned recently. I’m looking across the solar system and the planets are right there; little worlds that I can stretch out and grasp, even reach down and touch their surfaces. My eyes are telescopic; everything far is near and I see space warping around, bending the distant galaxies into my proximity. This dream has reappeared to me in various forms over the years and it’s always exhilarating to experience it. You might think I might want to try and draw my dreams, but I don’t. The results are always disappointing. I dream in black and white or very subtle color that is much the cast of my drawings, but my dreams are mostly vague, shifting, mental images that feel so different that what I manage to put on paper. Perhaps film would be a better medium in which to construct surrogates for dream experiences. But even so, I’m not sure that rendering my dreams in any medium would be as pungent an art experience as someone might think. Have you ever had someone tell you their dreams? Most are pretty dull to an outsider. I am absolutely content to write my dreams out each morning, and occasionally rewrite and rethink special ones on my drawings. I believe dreams are symbol-filled missives from the subconscious that will reveal a great deal about my psyche if I study them closely. But, my associative readings are probably opaque to most of those who would want to try and follow along. Regarding the image above, it’s a work-in-progress, a composition sketched out in pencil with various areas articulated in watercolor. The image is dominated by a 19th century ...Read More
2009-04-08 02:58:07 | Cadence
(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 ...Read More
2009-03-13 17:02:52 | A Mix
A Mix I will soon have to put away my landscape drawings. Tiny red, green, and white buds now cloud my window as bare winter topography fills in and a leafy view evolves toward a different set of drawing challenges for spring and summer. I am committed to making my art directly from my subjects; photographs and sketches just aren’t enough for me, so I follow the dictates of the season and have come to enjoy turning over drawings with the calendar. If I don’t finish these winter drawings, I will bring them back out again next November. Before I switch to the next batch of drawings in mid-April, I have my eye on finishing several pieces, but I won’t force closure. One way I do this is by rotating a mixture of drawings across the worktable, keeping many elements in flux so that I can‘t develop an attachment to a single work, nor get too involved with the inevitable stumbling blocks that arise within particular pieces. When I’m getting stuck, I move to the next work, not stopping to think much about my difficulties. Often, upon returning to that drawing, I find the blockage has evaporated, and I can see the image more clearly due to of the distance and experience I have placed between myself and the perceived entanglement. Regardless, I always ramp up the energy before disengaging at season’s end. One current drawing has been a particularly interesting challenge (image above). Created on the same paper that I use in my journals, a 90 pound hot press Arches watercolor paper, the support is thinner than the 140 pound Fabriano hot press paper that I commonly use for drawings outside my journals. On such lightweight paper, the heavily worked surface undulates, as if it were vellum or thin leather (this relief is probably best visible in the photograph at ...Read More
2009-02-22 07:16:38 | A Hunt in the Forest
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 ...Read More
2008-11-28 17:07:35 | Passage
Charles Ritchie, Copy after The Large Enclosure by Caspar David Friedrich, watercolor and graphite on Arches paper in bound volume, page size: 4 x 6”. Passage When I copy the work of other artists in my journal, I meditate on their art in a systematic, physical way and by doing so often discover passages I might otherwise miss. The art of Caspar David Friedrich, the great German 19th century Romantic, has long been a favorite of mine. I find works such as The Large Enclosure spellbinding. This sublime landscape is dominated by an arc of clouds sweeping down towards an upwards bowing waterway. As a little boat approaches the center, it appears to be squeezed in a convergence of earth and sky. Sinuous networks of clouds and waterways enhance the sense of constriction. As I made my copy, I noted a little opening between the trees that is just the shape of the boat’s sail; like an empty space calling to the piece of a puzzle that fills it. But I sense The Large Enclosure represents passage on other levels as well. The dark trees in the middle ground block our view, creating hidden space relieved by tantalizing vistas that stretch into open landscape. While sketching, I noted a subtler passage at the far right, deeper in the distance (see the detail on the right page of the sketchbook spread below). I had never before observed this second tree line, one that offers a solitary opening into a further realm. Perhaps this passage was a symbolic crux of the picture for Friedrich, whose Christian faith would offer a single path out of our earthly enclosure. Several other thoughts occurred to me as I continued to sketch. The broad arcs that underpin the waterways and clouds in this work imply imaginary circles that stretch beyond the picture frame; evoking the curve of the ...Read More
2008-11-18 18:40:32 | One Place / Any Place
Charles Ritchie, Interior/Exterior, 1987-1989, watercolor, graphite, and pen and ink on Fabriano paper, sheet/image: 8 1/8” x 29 3/8”, collection of the artist. Note the oak tree just to the left of center in the middle ground and compare it with the same tree 20 years later seen in the image below. Charles Ritchie, Self-Portrait with Night: Side Panels I, 2006-2008, watercolor and graphite on Fabriano paper, sheet/image: 5 3/4 x 17 1/4″. Both of the works pictured above are in the exhibition From the Inside Looking Out: Charles Ritchie on view at Gallery Joe, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania through 20 December 2008. One Place / Any Place I sat down for the first time at my window nearly 25 years ago and looked out to the row of suburban houses. Since that time I’ve watched people move into those houses and transfer away. I’ve watched an oak grow from a modest sapling into a towering tree. I’ve seen the girths of three magnificent tulip poplar trees broaden. I’ve had dogwoods come and go; young redbuds block my view and then grow tall beyond my window frame. I’ve seen houses painted, screened porches become additions, and yards become forests, lawns manicured. Chimneys and roofs repaired. Leaves fill the yards and daffodils rise. Sunrise flood the neighborhood and sunset wash it red, winter noon burn out detail and summer diffuse it. I’ve watched my face grow older incrementally night after night, reflected in the window; superimposed over blackness, lamps, and nebulae. A favorite book of mine is The Enigma of Arrival by V.S. Naipaul in which the author illuminates minute and intermittent changes that underpin what appears to be a static universe. It is all a matter of attention. A friend of mine, writer Peter Turchi, has paralleled my enthusi ...Read More
2008-11-01 01:02:44 | Day Dreams
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 jou ...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
2008-08-13 04:26:14 | Risk: Turning Pages, Part 2
Charles Ritchie, Interior with Stack of Journals, work in progress, second state, watercolor and graphite on Fabriano paper, 4 x 6″. Risk: Turning Pages, Part 2 When is a work of art complete? When is it overworked? When is the artist signing off prematurely; too easily satisfied? These are difficult questions that permeate the core of painting. My online journal entry on 1 June examined the abandoned watercolor, Interior with Stack of Journals and my plans to reinvestigate the image on another sheet. Through the summer I have continued work on the second attempt (see above), taking advantage of the period when the early evening light enters the west window of my studio. As the season comes to an end, and the specific lighting on my subject drifts away, I find myself pleased with the work. It has reached a plateau, as many drawings do; very close to way I had envisioned it, with some surprising details evolving; the mirror on the desk reflecting a bit of interior, for instance. However, the big improvement is that the brightness of the landscape has remained; far preferable to the overworked landscape in the previous version. A plateau can be dangerous, though. One might easily convince oneself the work is done. At any point along the creation of an image there are times of balance and imbalance. I consider the present manifestation of Interior with Stack of Journals (above) a balanced composition, but not yet finished. My major dissatisfaction is that I want the interior to be darker in very specific places; more like my most recent preparatory journal sketch (Book 130, 11 May 2008). To accomplish this I will apply wash; not too dark not too light. If done just right it will increase contrast with the light from the window while integrating details and further unif ...Read More
2008-07-06 11:42:39 | Life is
Charles Ritchie, No. 1 from the book anyone lived in a pretty how town, 1976, silver gelatin photograph in handmade bound volume, 3 3/8 x 6 1/2″ Life is E.E. Cummings was one of the first poetic voices to seduce me. Sure, his irregular punctuation, errant capitalization, and typographic anarchy appealed to a young, mildly rebellious teenager. The poems act up physically. Think about the motions of your eyes on a Cummings page; think about your brain trying to herd unruly fragments toward comprehension (see for example his poem r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r). But after the visual grenades go off, a deeply romantic mist remains. Cummings’ work is filled with warmth and heart and that is what won me over; not ruckus and wordplay. Cummings’ poem, anyone lived in a pretty how town contains his signature odd language (“noone” and “anyone” as protagonists; what’s a “how town”?) but its quatrains lull with rhymes and images of the commonplace; rising and falling sun, moon, stars, rain, joys, sorrows, bells, and people. Repetitive like houses, like lives, like gravestones; I’ve always read this poem as peaceful acceptance of mortality; an existentialist refrain in the guise of a child’s song. Anyone and noone equal you and me. We lived, we loved, we died. Life may be good or bad; regardless, life is. Charles Ritchie, two page spread including No. 11 from anyone lived in a pretty how town, 1976, pen and ink and silver gelatin photograph in handmade bound volume, sheet: 8 x 9″ Not too many steps away from Cumming’s poem is a short story by Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party; a cinematic rendering of a social gala that funnels into the most intimate moment of experience. The ending of Mansfield’s exquisite miniature returns us the most essential qu ...Read More
2008-06-15 07:47:50 | Finding Forbears
(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, ...Read More
2008-06-07 07:39:55 | Place to Be
Charles Ritchie, Window with Moon and Star, 1983, watercolor and pen and ink on Fabriano paper, image: 4 1/4 x 2 3/4″, sheet: 4 1/4 x 2 3/4″, frame: 14 x 11″, private collection, 1983.1.5 Place to Be I was standing in the record store but suddenly I was somewhere else. Two musical lines were weaving around me; a gentle male tenor twining a cello. I was no longer in staring into a vinyl record bin; I was seeing into the soul of the sky. The year was 1978 and I was being introduced to Nick Drake’s Cello Song; music that would haunt me the rest of my life. When I hear the fading passages of Cello Song; Nick’s voice rhyming the strings, the thock of tabla and leaping bass with Nick’s acoustic guitar ringing time, I am transported back to that first musical audience. The memory is so clear and yet simultaneously so ineffable. I inhabit my memory of both the physical space where I stood listening and the emotional sky of my imagination. It is like waking from a dream and remembering the exact feeling and atmosphere, yet being utterly helpless to transcribe it. How do we capture that place to be? Creating a work of art often feels like an effort to to do just that. I look at each page of my journal as a path back to a particular moment in my life. Clearly defined or diffuse, the entries are road markers evoking many levels of past experience. The written word, the image I’ve painted, even the page itself can trigger memories of the context in which I was writing. It is the same with any of my works. They are references to previous lives; real and fictive. For example, my drawing Window with Moon and Star was created in a earlier residence. I recall the boat kept in the next driveway, the reproductions of works of art I was displaying on the walls, the w ...Read More
2008-05-27 04:09:39 | In the Country
Book 130, Entries for 25-26 May 2008 with studies of a tree at midday and the bright star Vega reflected in the pond at night, watercolor, graphite and pen and ink on Arches paper in bound volume, page size 4 x 6″ In the Country I hiked along a freshly asphalted lane through woods and fields past the occasional dirt driveway. Sprays of white blackberry and yellow buttercups brushed my legs. After a long walk the trees opened to a vista of red earth jumbled with roots and stumps. Recent lumbering had left acres of devastation. Beside me of hillock of stumps rose out of the wreckage. I was surprised when a sudden wind seemed to aim right at the point where I was looking. The small cyclone raked a single trunk and the bark scattered all around as if there had been a blast. I was showered in bark. A strange moment; I had to laugh out loud. That evening I stepped out into the clear night; the sky brimming with stars. Yellow Saturn sat beside Reglus in the constellation Leo above. I made my way through the pitch black down a familiar dirt trail to the pond. Feeling the way with my feet, I turned slowly toward the frogs and other creatures clicking, creaking, and shouting in the brush. Moving closer, the sound became so intense it pelted me, shaking my bones. I looked into the pond where bright Vega sat, brilliant, undiminished in reflection. That light left the star 27 years ago, a point near the beginning of my journals. I laughed again and felt a small part of the pantomime. Hats off to Wallace Stevens; see Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, III. ...Read More
2008-04-12 04:30:22 | The Star Magnolia
Charles Ritchie, two Polaroid photographs of a star magnolia, (both images taken approximately 1:15 pm, 11 April 2000) The Star Magnolia As daffodils flooded the front yard, forsythia glowed, and the star magnolia exploded white across the street, I sat at my window dazed. We had just put our cat to sleep. Cancer took him; far too young. The day’s beauty heightened the sadness. April is the cruelest month. I gazed into the star magnolia and suddenly I realized my loss would always be tied to this flowering. Nothing new about this kind of association. A year after Lincoln died, Walt Whitman remembered his hero in a poem, When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d. Likewise for me, the significance of blossoms had changed. Looking down at my worktable, I saw my tiny drawing, Self-Portrait with Blossoming Star Magnolia; one of my problem children; a drawing that I had been working on for years. I’ve been trotting it out for the few weeks of peak blossoms and then putting it away, always dissatisfied; perennially hopeful for a recovery during next year’s session. I’ve worked and reworked the tiny sheet; erased it, scrubbed the paper with large flat, synthetic bristle brushes pulling out the watercolor (see images below). I’ve redrawn and repainted, and then scrubbed and erased again. I’m not sure what is so hard about this piece. Perhaps it is finding the right twilight atmosphere. Perhaps it is coaxing nuances of color that don’t overpower. Perhaps it is the composition. During the current session, I removed two subjects from the foreground of the drawing: a postcard and a dried orange. Scrubbed them away, and replaced them with an image of one of my own larger drawings; another of my trouble children: Night with Orion. This felt better. The new ...Read More
2008-02-23 15:26:42 | Antares Rising: Drawing Seasons
Self-Portrait with Night XI: Graphite, first state of drawing as it looked on 26 March 2007.Graphite on Fabriano paper, sheet size: 5 5/8 x 12″ My studio hours begin well before sunrise. While sitting at my window in late winter, I can see Antares, the brightest star in the constellation Scorpius, rise ahead of the sun. Deep red in color, its procession toward the zenith means that spring is coming. When Antares becomes centered in my morning window and finally obscured by foliage I put away my current group of drawings and I won’t pick them up again until the leafless landscape reappears in late November. Self-Portrait with Night XI: Graphite (link shows second state of drawing as it looked on 24 January 2008) is among my current investigations. The drawing was begun in December 2006, was put away for the summer of 2007 and returned to my focus last fall. The images seen above and below represent stages of the drawing almost a year apart. I’m content with slow growth. In this drawing I am learning how to use graphite as a tonal medium rather than as an outline for watercolor as I have used it in the past. Building graphite in layers using a eraser coated in graphite to smear and burnish is unlike anything I have done before. I may finish the work this season or I could put it away for another year. Drawing in cycles asks me to lose something and forget all of the things I was thinking about it. When I rediscover winter drawings after six months of summer I return with new experience. Seeing a drawing after an extended break is a real spark. Like the surprise of finding Antares in the window once again. Self-Portrait with Night XI: Graphite, third state of drawing as it looked on 22 February 2008. Graphite on Fabriano paper, sheet size: 5 5/8 x 12″ ...Read More
2008-02-17 06:37:07 | Mapping the Night
Figure 1. Digital photograph of the north wall of the artist’s studio displaying a Celestial Map plotted and drawn by David W. Teske in 1972. Note that the astronomical illustrations have been added to the sides of the map, echoing the panel arrangements in maps pictured in Vermeer paintings. Astronomical charts hang in my studio. They often appear in my drawings as dark rectangular fields; like windows into some parallel night. For example, the one at center of my drawing Self-Portrait with Long Night is a large star map with hand-plotted points marking stars of different sizes on a deep indigo field (Figure 1). What a labor of love for the cartographer who marked the heavens by hand with 5,172 dots of light, noting brightness and inscribing beside each a reference number. Another chart that is seen in my drawing Daffodils with Astronomical Chart, dates to the mid 19th century and was originally used to teach astronomy (Figure 2). In it, comets and other celestial phenomena are reduced to striking minimal shapes in black and white. The engraved images are arranged in a grid, much like my night drawings pervade the grid of the window. Author Peter Turchi first drew my attention to the phrase “private astronomy”, once used to describe jazz musician Bix Beiderbecke who was seen “gazing off into his private astronomy, blowing something pretty.” The phrase seemed on the mark to me; I do feel I am a private astronomer mapping my way through the night. Watching the lights move and grow and die through the seasons and years. The maps that surround me echo my search that starts locally and stretches out into the night as far as one imagines. Figure 2. Digital photograph of the west wall of the artist’s studio with two framed pages from the Atlas Designed to ...Read More
2008-02-03 10:43:49 | Goya's "Third of May": A Childhood Epiphany
Study after Francisco Goya, Third of May 1808, watercolor and graphite on Arches paper in bound volume, 4 x 6″ I was in second grade when I noticed a book on the coffee table in our living room; Fifty Centuries of Art by Francis Henry Taylor. This was surely my first immersion into the strange, fantastic, beautiful, and sometimes disturbing world of fine art. I remember paging slowly until I discovered the works by Francisco Goya. At bottom left was an image that startled me; the Third of May, 1808. I wanted to look away, yet I couldn’t. Who is that man with his arms raised? Why are the soldiers shooting him? Who are these gunmen, I can’t see their faces? How horrible, the dead already piled in the foreground and those soon to die in the background! This was the stuff of nightmares; to a young child there is no difference between image and actual event. Eventually, I learned the historical fact that Napoleon’s troops had executed Madrid’s insurgents who rose up against them; but Goya relied largely upon his imagination when he painted this masterpiece seven years after the event. Goya had taken a rectangle of canvas and used techniques developed over the centuries; linear perspective, atmospheric perspective, sfumato, others; and had created an image that shook me, changed the shape of my brain, and shifted my world view by waging its potent magic. I looked at Goya’s work and wanted to learn that magic. I began there. Link to image of Goya’s original oil painting, Third of May 1808. ...Read More
2008-01-27 07:15:44 | Thursday Night Figure Drawing
Two Figures, 2007, graphite on wove paper in ring-bound sketchbook I’m usually tired by Thursday night but I go to figure drawing group anyway. It’s probably the same reason some people won’t miss a physical workout; I feel better after three hours of exercising eyes, hands, and brain. Part of the energy spills from the drawing games I play: no eraser allowed, get the complete figure down (including hands and feet) no matter the length of the pose, draw without my reading glasses, don’t look at the paper while drawing, draw the subject from memory after the pose is over. These are just a few of the ever-changing boundaries I set and reset as I dig with a 6B graphite stick into my sketchpad. But, as with all satisfying games, there’s a serious side. I am practicing my scales, training the eye and hand to synchronize, and developing my ability to structure and proportion intuitively. One of my favorite masters of the figure, Auguste Rodin, often preferred to draw his subject nude, then after selecting the pose, he redrew the subject clothed. He sought to understand the underpinnings before he attempted the mantle. The body is the world laid bare. And though the nude is foreign to my prints and drawings, I see it as a winter tree before my window that soon will be covered with summer leaves. ...Read More
2008-01-20 02:49:56 | Wall/Window/Mirror: "I dwell in possibility"
Self-Portrait, 1979, acrylic and tempera on paper, 5 7/8 x 7 5/8″, collection of the artist Wall/Window/Mirror: “I dwell in possibility” The paintings I enjoy are true to reality; honest about the fact that their surface is a wall no eye can penetrate. They seduce with materials and technique. At the same time I expect a painting to take me somewhere; usually through the magic of illusionism, converting that wall into a window upon other worlds. I believe such transformations can empower the viewer, providing a mirror to turn upon themselves. Wall, window, mirror: three expectations for painting. Emily Dickenson’s poem I dwell in possibility (#657) develops through these states. The poem passes from the concreteness of house and prose; dives through windows and doors through diaphanous cedars, and then springs through roof to open sky. In the first two stanzas we see interpenetrations of house and landscape, interior and exterior, and intimate and immense space which return and unite with the self in the third stanza. Wall, window, mirror; I seek these in my work. Folded Self Portrait with Night I: Graphite, 2007, graphite on Fabriano paper, 4 1/4 x 12 1/4″, collection of the artist ...Read More
2007-12-19 10:51:41 | Comet Holmes in Perseus
Near the end of October 2007 Comet Holmes appeared as a fuzzy patch in the lower left of “K” shaped constellation Perseus. It was not as bright as comets I’ve seen previously; Hale-Bopp or Hyakutake. But I experienced a similar realignment as I strained to see the tiny ephemeral light in the night. I am reminded of Emily Dickenson’s poem Safe in their Alabaster Chambers (216 /1861 version). I imagine comets as the suppliers of organic chemicals that are the building blocks of life; providing a kind of Darwinian resurrection on planets. On another level, Richard Eberhart’s wonderful 1958 poem A Ship Burning and a Comet, All in One Day (not available online, so far) evokes the beauty of these creative and destructive forces we usually view from afar. ...Read More
2007-10-16 04:03:40 | Lights in the Sky / 1 October 2007
Up before sunrise and standing in a parking lot. I looked up in the sky and saw patterns of lights. A very wide soft, shaft like a searchlight to the west, and delicate ripples of clouds to the southeast. A few seconds later I looked again. They were gone. Mirages. Probably due to the sharp and uneven lighting in the parking lot that surrounded me. Or I was just too tired. “I have discovered that most of the beauties of travel are due to the strange hours we keep to see them…” William Carlos Williams ...Read More
2007-09-17 12:20:28 | Bowl of Water in Sunlight / 16-17 September 2007, 7:30 am
Epemeral light. For two days in September sunlight shoots through a southeast window of our house and briefly into the water bowl on our chest. I don’t usually trust the camera but in this situation it seems worthwhile. The first morning’s digital shots were blurry. The following morning I was ready and captured the image with only an instant to spare. The effect lasted maybe 20 seconds and was gone. I will never really see that effect again and I can only imagine the infinite number of subjects I miss that are around me. ...Read More