Chicago landscape painter sees the art in wind turbines

When Brian Ritchard drove through the Midwest on road trips in recent years, he found himself struck by a relatively new sight: Wind turbines. There were so many of the tall towers with their spinning rotors on the farm fields he passed, dotting the land like slender, machine-made trees, that they seemed a part of the landscape.

Ritchard is a Chicago-based landscape painter. He found the sight intriguing — and reminiscent of 17th-century Dutch landscapes that incorporated windmills.

And he had found the subject of his next body of work.

He made a sketching trip to downstate Bureau County. He followed up with trips to hillier country in Texas and Minnesota.

The result can be seen at the Schoenherr Gallery at North Central College in Naperville, which is hosting an exhibition of Ritchard’s wind turbine landscapes.

The turbines are silhouetted against clouds and sky, narrow sentries over the farmland, limned in white lines reflecting the sun or dark slashes in brooding light.

“I was struck by the beauty of the structural works in the landscape,” said Ritchard, the academic adviser for fine art and art history at Columbia College Chicago, in his studio behind his bungalow in the Beverly neighborhood.

A longtime landscape painter — he was commissioned by the city of Chicago for a series of paintings depicting the natural world, which are on display at the Beverly Branch of the Chicago Public Library — he is interested in the visual tension between the horizontal landscape and the vertical towers, he said. And he is much taken with the towers themselves.

“I think they are beautiful. I think they are majestic,” he said. “I love to see them in the changing light, like haystacks.”

But his subject isn’t simply the turbines’ beauty. For one thing, he said, not everyone thinks they have any.

“The fact that they happen to be beautiful is a matter of taste,” Ritchard said. “Many people regard them as a blight on the landscape.”

His deeper interest is in the confluence of nature and society, and in the turbines’ purpose of turning wind into power.

“I was struck by the turbines as being emblematic of a desire to live differently on the planet,” he said.

“I wanted to have a subject that was more directly connected in the real world, that had to do with my interest in nature from a sustainability point of view — and the turbines jumped out at me as a way to connect the old with the new.”

That contrast is part of what impressed gallery director Nickole Lanham about Ritchard’s work.

“I looked at it and fell in love with it,” she said. “You’ve got the old school, the very traditional and classical way he paints, but it’s (also) got this brand-new renewable energy source that brings everything full circle.”

The paintings also reflect a landscape that is increasingly common, especially in Illinois. The state has the fifth-highest installed capacity for wind power production in the nation, according to the American Wind Energy Association.

At the end of 2014, Illinois had 2,195 turbines, up from 1,017 in 2009 — an increase of about 115 percent.

Ritchard began his project in Bureau County, 120 miles southwest of Chicago, home to a number of wind farms.

“I went off the highway and onto the byways,” he said, heading onto rural roads in search of wind turbines.

When he found visually interesting ones, he stood in the road making watercolor sketches, prompting locals to stop and offer help.

“They always assumed I had a flat tire,” said Ritchard, who appreciated the kindness — and the suggestions about the best nearby barbecue spots.

Back in his studio, he set about turning his sketches into oil paintings, ones informed by 19th -American and 17th-century Dutch landscapes.

“What I’m doing is a hybrid of those things, but depicting a subject matter that is modern and contemporary,” he said.

Dutch painters often included windmills in their works. They were proud of their nation and its emerging mercantile power, said Nina Dubin, art historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

“It’s really Dutch artists who are for the first time placing notable landmarks in paintings to give viewers a recognizable sense of where these places are, and also doing it with a real sense of national pride,” she said.

Wind turbines are not the same as windmills, as Ritchard, who initially wasn’t clear on the differences, came to learn. Windmills use the wind to grind grain; wind turbines convert it into electricity.

But Ritchard sees wind turbines as the same kind of technological advancements the windmills once were for the Dutch — and, like Dutch painters, is depicting them with admiration.

His respect for them is clear, Dubin said.

Ritchard’s paintings “are really elevating these turbines, giving them a kind of ennobling — giving them a status that is reminiscent of those windmills,” she said.

The turbines look a little like figures, she said, or trees or flashes of lightning. “They seem to really be almost extensions of the natural world,” she said.

Ritchard’s work has been featured in the wind energy association’s blog. Broadwind Energy, a Cicero-based manufacturer of towers and gears for wind turbines, bought two of his paintings and displays them in its boardroom.

“I’d like (people) to see the turbines as being beautiful and maybe as well as emblems of sustainable architecture,” he said. “But primarily I’m happy when people respond to them as landscapes.”

Brian Ritchard’s Turbine Paintings Series will be on view through June 14 at the Schoenherr Gallery, in North Central College’s Fine Arts Center, 171 E. Chicago Ave., Naperville. Ritchard will speak at an artist’s reception at the gallery at 6 p.m. June 6; https://finearts.northcentralcollege.edu/venues/schoenherr-gallery.

blbrotman@tribpub.com

Twitter @BarbaraBrotman