Inside the Engine Room: A Conversation with Ross Richie

Abstract

"Over the last couple of decades, Ross Ritchie has made pictures consistent with those he did early on in his career: appropriations of European art, enigmatic scenarios, loose gestural passages mixed with firm draughtsmanship. In between times, there were phases of pop, abstraction and even conceptualism. When Edward Hanfling visited the artist at his home in Birkenhead on Auckland's North Shore, they had a free flowing conversation about the process of making pictures, lessons learnt from painting billboards as well as from the works and philosophies of other artists, the more than 20 years Ritchie spent working at the Auckland City Art Gallery, and the way his psychological make-up feeds his art."