Lorna Ritz | Mt. Norwottuck of the Holyoke Mountain Range Drawings, Amherst, Massachusetts

I set my easel overlooking one of the only east-west axis mountain ranges in this country formed by glaciers. I rework each drawing for many days, obtaining a specific light from the sky falling on the mountains that will never bring these particular colors again. This is how I learn new color relationships that create a harmony, or a dissonance, that will feed into my abstract paintings.

I have drawn the Holyoke Mountains for 36 years and am still learning them. I can never get the shape of Mt. Norwottuck right and have to search for it all over again, every drawing. It is the search that gives the drawing its source of life. Everything in the drawing has equal importance: the tree is as important as the mountain behind it, as the sky moving behind them, as the foreground coming up towards the viewer. Everything is democratically related, a conglomeration of spatial movements interrelated, needing each other to survive. Whatever goes on 'out there' goes from my eyes to my hands.

Over time many of the trees have died (once the orchard was taken over by the Town when the owner, a farmer, died). My beloved apple trees were choked by vines and sumac; poison ivy became rampant. If the orchard was not mowed, I had to learn how to draw hay. In 2021 I immortalized the last of the hundreds of apple trees left.