These images are representative of work done over the last six years, and are distinct and differentiated from the large-scale canvasses on the painting page. They serve as a journal of sorts - and in their composition, they are made in an animation that is akin to writing.
All similar in scale- the paintings are generally 12 to 14 inches in their smallest dimension, painted on wood panel. They are an involvement with composition and formality, and reference aspects of representation, abstraction, and symbolization.
There is an association with an actual place or event that serves as an armature for the activity of painting, and a stretching of meaning from something quite specific to a generic or more universal representation. Working reductively within a given composition, and abandoning space as an ordering principle to a more automatic, calligraphic and surface oriented structure, the paintings develop a complex syntax of simplified form.
Playing the tensions between surface and space, color and shape, Painter Doug Ritter creates a kind of code, an elemental, symbolic visual language, to describe his experience of place. There is clearly a narrative instinct in the work, but mostly, through the structure of the painting, he is "making a path between things." Ritter puzzles flags of primary color, roof lines, cottage gardens, fishing boats, like a mariner's semaphore, embedding his post verbal story in a mosaic of reductive form that echoes the spirit of early modernists.
This work is more about creating structures that bring together the immediate sensual experience and the memory of place or event, embracing "the active space between experience and memory." In these mostly small paintings Ritter, gathers shards of bright color, creating abstraction out of real experience and the memory of real place.
- Eileen Kennedy
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