2011-09-24 09:13:49 | Dust and Shade: Drawings by Charles Ritchie

(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 realityIs a solid. It may be a shade that traversesA 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 fron ...Read More