Bill Ritchie Artwork in the

Richard Gurtiza Collection

Wapato Landscape

1964. Lithograph printed from stone. Ochre, black (deep purple). Image 15 3/4 X 12 in on 17 3/4 X 13 5/8 in Basingwerk Parchment paper. No. (unknown) of 18 impressions. Signed lower right. Framed. Purchased in 2000 from the Artist's Gallery on 5th and Aloha Street.

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, full of trees and living things when I made this image.

About the patron

Richard Gurtiza, a Filipino American, was pictured in an exhibit at the Wing Luke Museum. He is notable as director of Region 37 of the Inland Boatmen’s Union in Seattle, an affiliate of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), Region 37, 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,” and opened at the Wing Luke Asian Museum in Seattle Sept. 27, 2007. Ritchie recalls that Mr. Gurtiza liked the lithograph because it reminded him of the Yakima Valley (where Wapato is) where he grew up.

Send E-mail to the artist
ritchie@emeralda.com