Issue 32: Meet the new curated team | Featured Artist Charles Ritchie
Q: Where do KHÔRA’s artists and writers come from?
Welcome to KHÔRA, a dynamic online arts space produced in collaboration with Lidia Yuknavitch’s Corporeal Writing. Visit our Archive to read previous issues. Scroll down if you would like your work to be considered for future issues.
Issue 32 is here! We’re thrilled to introduce the newest members of our curated team: writers Melissa Leto, Jesse Sorrell, Deborah Stein, and Swati Sudarsan; and artists Melissa Leto, Sorcha McNamara, Michel O’Hara, and Deborah Stein. As you get to know them, you’ll see that many of our newest team members are writers whose words are in conversation with their artistic practice, or artists whose artmaking is an interplay with words.
Where do KHÔRA’s curated team members come from?
Curated team members write and make art with us for four consecutive issues. Some come to KHÔRA through the recommendation of another artist or at my own request, but the majority have sent us their work through KHÔRA’s 500 words and images.
KHÔRA is a form that is continually opening. We invite you to join us in sustaining it together. Team-based, collaborative, and curated, we don't believe in rejections. KHÔRA is about considering how multiple voices can be heard; how frameworks, traditions, and projects can inform each other; and how new perspectives emerge from collaboration and openness.
Once you send us your work, it will always remain active in KHÔRA’s ocean. You won’t ever receive a notice of rejection from us. We stay open to the possibility that all artmaking may be a good fit for future issues.
Featured Artist Charles Ritchie: 5 Sketchbooks
Artist Charles Ritchie began keeping a journal in his first sketchbook on his twenty-third birthday in 1977 and has completed 167 volumes and counting since that time. Each journal is filled chronologically, from front page to back. On the average, one volume is finished every 3 1/2 months.
Ritchie says of this practice:
As an artist who works on paper, I keep a journal as an essential activity. These sketchbooks are filled with watercolor, graphite, and pen and ink studies based on subjects seen around my studio at various times of day, through the seasons and years. Working quickly, and usually before the motif, I distill to the essence of what excites me: a color, a form, a state. I paint towards my mental image of that effect while welcoming serendipitous accident. My aim is to look deeply into myself and my subject, attempting to dig below the surface of things…
…among the images, I write in my private notehand that allows me to compose quickly and conserve space in the books. My notations do not necessarily inform the abutting drawings, but usually trace my train of thought, daily meditations and discoveries, and dreams. Particularly in my dreams, I feel an emotional resonance with events in my everyday life. I have come to think of all my entries, both texts and images, as reflections of my subconscious.
To see more, Read 5 Sketchbooks.
We’ll be back soon with more highlights from Issue 32.
If you'd like to enter the collaborative open waters of KHÔRA, please send us 500 Words. If you’re a visual artist interested in submitting artwork or images, click here.
With galactic gratitude,
Leigh Hopkins (Editor & Curator)
and the Corporeal/KHÔRA squad