We are liquidating our private collection of her works, covering over 60 years of art, along with some done by her husband, Ralph. There are over 100 pieces of sculpture and ceramics and about 200 paintings and drawings for sale, more than many artists will do in a lifetime.
The Gallery Site is under construction. This page, for example, is a starter, almost without design. That will change. Some links will not work, yet. Their destination will appear, sooner or later.
Here are examples of her work, scroll down to the list. This is an introduction. Periodically, additional pieces will be added to each category: Check back often. The books each have detailed pages available from our bookstore Home Page.
The Gallery is still under construction. It will be open when this notice disappears. Scroll down to see samples of her work:
Paintings | Sculpture | Drawings | Her Books | Prints ( inactive directory at present )
If you do not wish to wait for the addition of new works to this Website, purchase a copy of the CD book, Fern Joan Ritchie, Artist, A Biography. It has photos of over 400 pieces of her art in several media. The large quantity of photographs prohibit the production of this book in print.
We are still trying to figure out the best way to present a price list. If something excites you enough to want it, please contact us and get the information before your favorite is gone.
Background:
Born, raised, and trained in California, Fern Ritchie has had 157 one-man shows, and over 600 painting-exhibit showings, in 17 States. Her works sold from her own Gallery for 20 years. She is represented in several collections.
She is a graduate of the California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland. Her MFA degree is from Claremont Graduate School, works done at Scripps College, Claremont, California.
Since 1950, Fern has been a full time, professional artist. Her first professional showing was in The Santa Barbara Museum of Fine Art in 1951, followed by a show at the City of Paris Gallery in San Francisco. Most of her landscape painting was done in Southern California, Many of our favorite paintings of hers have decorated our home for years and are now presented here.
The high point in her career was her own Gallery, Sculpture Garden, and Studio, Studios West, in Encinitas, California, 30 miles north of San Diego, from 1968 to 1987. Previous to her own Gallery, she was represented in several Southern California Galleries. Selling only from her own Gallery resulted in a few less painting sales, but more income.
Her display of sculpture gardens in competition, at the Southern California Expo, Del Mar, and Los Angeles County Fair, exposed their works to over a million people each year, resulting in commissions that lasted until the next Fairs. Architectural sculpture became the mainstay and gradually she devoted less and less time to painting and more to sculpture.
After nearly 20 years, the Studio was crowded out by urban sprawl. The unlimited, hillside view of the Pacific Ocean became a surrounding wall of about 500 apartments in six months; they moved to rural Oregon. Since then her time has been devoted to writing, weaving, publishing, and horticulture. Her horticulture experience resulted in five books. Her most recent book is about weaving. The career of a very active artist is documented in:
Fern Joan Ritchie, Artist: Her life, Times, and Works, from 1948 to Present.
A biographical book by Ralph W. Ritchie, published on CD, presenting 400 photographs of her paintings, sculpture, fabric arts, and writings.
Farming Is Easy. . . .An Autobiography, written with her husband, about 30 years of rural living and their return to the city. The book documents part of their 57-year adventure together, as of July 4, 2005. Both printed and CD editions are available.
We are liquidating our private collection of her works, along with those done by her husband, Ralph. There are over 100 pieces of sculpture and ceramics and about 200 paintings and drawings for sale, more than many artists will do in a lifetime.
Presenting The Introductory Selection
Bronze Door Sculpture | Partridge Sculpture | Wall Fountain Sculpture | |
Snail Sketches | Snail and Frog Book Illustration | Out of Work Portrait | Acrylic Painting Squares 1 |Watercolor Oregon Driftwood
|Watercolor Autumn Leaves | Watercolor Guiseppi-Maria | Watercolor Snow To The Foothills |
Their website, www.ritchieunlimitedpublications.com , presents 41 publications. Six by Fern; many co-authored with her husband, and his books .
Materials and Experience
Fern has always used the highest quality materials obtainable. In this I was able to assist with knowledge and experience. I apprenticed to a woodcarver at age eleven. His principle product was ornate picture frames and carved decorations.
Sharing the same loft was a paint maker. His family had sent him to this country from France prior to WWII to perpetuate the family craft with the threat of war facing them. I served as his assistant in off times with permission of the carver. Since nothing was automated, I had full knowledge of the processes. Fineness, consistency, and temperature control of oil paint making were watched manually. I have tended the paint mill many times over the average seven hours a particular color was ground. Some of those original tubes of oils are still viable after sixty-plus years.
In the Loft, we stretched quality linen canvas on 10 - yard by 3 - yard frames, made the gesso, and spread coats of it on the canvas with broad, 18" wide, knives. Everything I was assisting in its preparation brought the highest prices in the marketplace. I learned from the best.
Later, I worked as part time stock boy for a prominent art supply store, gaining a more complete knowledge of art materials and tools.
As a result I was familiar with art materials and the preparation of paints, making of picture frames, and preparation of canvas for art purposes; a perfect support combination for a Master Artist-Designer. My experience and background , which included engineering, was a perfect match for her talents as an artist. I have framed as many as sixty paintings for one of her shows, having made the frame stock from scratch, and then making the frames to size. I used to mill 1000 feet of basic frame stock at a time.
We devised mechanical means that gave her unlimited control over size, media, and functionality.
Her works, whatever the media, were properly treated as permanent art. The quality of materials was never budgeted; neither were the tools of her craft, nor the books and references in our Art Library. We carried these practices over to ceramics, formulating our own clay bodies and glazes that were fired in kilns of our own design.
We discovered that what people would buy was not necessarily what Galleries wanted or what she painted for Shows. The idea of our own Gallery was always with us. We built a Gallery as part of the 7,000 sq ft Studio, along with a Sculpture Garden outside. I would take a station wagon loaded with paintings to visit collectors of her work and come back empty.
When we had a new show in the Gallery, we invited clients, not other artists. We concentrated on the buying population, not the art community. Fern was a member of the California National Watercolor Society and participated in their shows and traveling exhibits for several years until the pressure of commissions and work for clients caused her to drop out altogether.
Now, having filled her fourth score years, she is content to write and garden, while maintaining the publishing endeavors jointly with her husband. We write, typeset, print, bind, and publish 42 books at this time, as well as maintaining our Web Bookstore and supplying other stores with our books.
Since the object was livelihood and she could sell whatever she made, Fern gradually stopped entering competitions and spending the time they required. Her art, and mine, supported the Studio for twenty years. As mentioned earlier, we were driven from the location that took many years to establish. The Studio on its one acre was razed and became a parking lot for an office building. We shipped 120,000 pounds, net, from our Studio to Oregon in three steel, forty foot, overseas, shipping containers. We found that neither of us had the desire to re-establish in a new location.
Presented here for sale is timeless art of varied styles of the pieces we chose to collect and display for our own pleasure over the years. There will be no more. This is a one time opportunity.
Sincerely,
Ralph Ritchie
Return to Bookstore
These are the copyrighted works of Ralph Ritchie and Fern Ritchie
Modified March 14, 2006