Bill Ritchie Artwork in Washington State
  
in the

Richard Gurtiza Collection

Wapato Landscape

Provenance: Print. 1964. Lithograph printed from two stones. Ochre, black (deep purple). Image 15 3/4 X 12 in on 17 3/4 X 13 5/8 in Basingwerk Parchment paper. No. 14/18. Signed lower right. Framed. Purchased in the year 2000 from the Artist's Gallery on 5th and Aloha Street. Also in the collection of Ross Jones, plus several which were sold in fundraising auctions in Washington and California, their whereabouts unknown at the time of this entry..

Artist's Comment: I arrived in San Jose in the autumn of 1964, you might say with the dust of my father's Wapato farm on my shoes. I was the country boy in the Big City (before San Jose was Silicon Valley). The university's first graduate student in printmaking, I was assigned a two-color lithograph. My technical education continued with a startup I got from central Washington, known for its riverbottom farmlands. I was thinking of those landscapes, dry grassy fields, brushlands and trees and creeping, flying living things when I made this image.

About Richard Gurtiza: I found a picture of Richard, a Filipino American, in an exhibit at the Wing Luke Museum. He was director of Region 37 of the Inland Boatmen’s Union in Seattle, an affiliate of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), representing the mostly Filipino cannery workers in Alaska and down the Pacific Coast. The traveling exhibit was titled, “Journey for Justice: 223 Years of Asian Pacific American History in the Puget Sound,” at the Wing Luke Asian Museum in Seattle in 2007. He came into our gallery at 500 Aloha Street and bought the print, and said that he liked it because it reminded him of the Yakima Valley (where Wapato in the title is located) where he grew up, as I did.

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Email: ritchie@seanet.com