The First Exhibition Ever - By Ray Ritchie

11 April - 11 May 2003 in the Hirschfeld Gallery
Ray Ritchie’s work can be seen within the noble New Zealand tradition of backyard tinkering—the same tradition that has produced whirligigs in the form of running Pukeko and cut-out used tyres that resemble swans. Ray works purposefully in the living room studio of his home in the old, undeveloped Wellington suburb of Newtown, often recycling materials like the backyard hobbyist. But his special achievement is to elevate this creative ‘language’ to a realm that involves poetry and philosophy—and keyed-up, visual mischief-making in general.

In his process of allowing materials and objects to be something else, Ray harnesses the outrageous freedom of childhood imagination. Some of his creations are worked out first through drawings, but most evolve in response to the materials he has at hand. All are methodically assembled and painted with deliberation—see, for instance, the laboured application of paint on his series of caps.

Ray also works as a wordsmith, making signs that recall the work of preacher-folk-artists of the Bible Belt in the U.S.A. He obviously takes great delight in visual puns and word play, and sometimes it is a turn of phrase that inspires his arrangement of forms. Take, for example, a recent sculptural work where a character has a ‘weight on his mind’ and the weight is illustrated by an abstract arrangement of coloured wood, carefully nailed to the head.

Yet weaving through this whimsy there is a deeper pulse, and it could be read as a spiritual element in Ray’s work. It is his depiction of the transience of things. In one painting three stages in the life of a woman are overlayed and interwoven (our eye struggles to separate out the shapes of the body parts). This overlaying of images is one of Ray’s graphic techniques. In another, the line that describes the edge of a form is broken like the centre line of a street, the object becoming transparent, floating, a phantom.

Ray’s work exposes the folly of human politics and subverts institutional authority. Often non-sense is made of signs, and institutional proclamations are turned inside out. But it’s not just a simple mockery of established orders. Evident in his work is the preacher-artist’s affection for a great creator—a creator who loves human animals and four legged animals, colour and chaos, and one who permits a poor mortal to find wonder in the ordinary, to transform a flip-top ashtray into the blinking eyes of a dog, and an old bathplug into a royal crown.

Ray Ritchie has lived and made art in the same house in the Wellington suburb of Newtown for the past 30 years. In his time Ray has worked as a civil servant, a merchant seaman and an actor. Ray’s work came to light when his wife Margaret responded to a notice I placed in a local community newspaper as part of a Massey University sponsored survey of self-taught and visionary artists in New Zealand. This is Ray’s first exhibition.

Stuart Shepherd
Guest Curator