I love the use of tone with a very restricted palette. The imagery is amplified by the effective use of color and tone.
Conversation
Conversation with the Artist in his Studio
This conversation between Charles Ritchie and Richard Waller took place in the artist's studio in Silver Spring, Maryland, on Saturday, November 21, 1992, and has been edited.
How did you come to the American home and suburbia as your central subject matter?
I love the American landscape, the home and its history, and particularly our suburban architecture. I like the American sense of space, the yard, and the netherlands that grow up between houses. I came to all of this from growing up in the suburbs; to paraphrase Mark Twain, "paint what you know," and I know suburbia well. As a child, I moved with my family every two or three years, and the houses and landscape became my emotional sounding board. The solitude represented in these houses is symbolic for everyone and certainly myself.
The exhibition is subtitled "the interior landscape." How does this refer to that metaphor?
The landscape is a symbol for the outer world, the desire to engage in the world. The interior is the self and the desire to be secure and protected within the home. The phrase merges the two aspects.
And Emily Dickinson's poem "I dwell in Possibility" is central to these thoughts?
The self becomes the house, and the house is possibility, responding to the world as it happens. Dickinson's house involves both the world without and within her "Paradise." Roof and sky are interchangeable, open and closed in the same breath. The chambers, as cedars, are permeable but difficult to see through. There is an implication of moving within the space of the self. I use this imagery, particularly in the reflection pieces where interior moves out and exterior moves in.
Your journals are crucial to an understanding of your imagery and the works in the exhibition.
The idea for keeping things in book form goes back to my childhood. In grade school I made books depicting imaginary worlds. In high school I drew, wrote, and composed songs in notebooks. By 1977 I had begun my present series, which now numbers more than eighty. These books contain dream imagery and narratives, directions to a new piece or old pieces, quotations, or just things I am thinking. They are evolving into a daily sketchbook to record ideas that strike me as significant. The journals are very private. The handwriting is generally illegible to other people, a small notehand I developed to get ideas down quickly.
The journals, then, are undeniably an integral aspect of your work. What is your process?
My first step is walking around the house, passing my subjects a thousand times. Suddenly, I know "that's it," an object seen in a particular light in the atmosphere of a particular day. The idea goes into the journal. My first images are very abstract, starting only in terms of the arrangements of forms and depiction in a loose sense. When I have decided what the image will be, I think about what paper to use. Paper is a wonderfully versatile support; I can easily adjust the size and shape in relation to the image. I keep lots of pieces of paper around the house as well as work tables with watercolor. Michelangelo's seeing the subject in the stone is analogous to my seeing the image in the paper. When I have determined and adjusted the paper, a few lines of pencil establish the composition. Often I will then do studies. Adding the tones in watercolor, I refine the image with pen and ink that has been diluted to various weights. I don't add white highlights but save the white of the paper to illuminate the work. I build up an image, and the creative process goes back and forth.
When we look at your work, we see a world of tonalities with very little color.
My perception of the suburban world is subdued, but I do select. I focus on the mystery of the contrast of dark and light. Night is a favorite theme because it filters out so much. It reduces things, levels things out, creates a powerful negative space. I am fascinated by empty spaces and the spirit of things.
http://www.charlesritchie.com/
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