THE DREW McRITCHIE ESTATE

Official Archive & Stewardship of the Artist’s Legacy (1954–2021)
Advancing research, curatorial scholarship, and collaborative partnerships dedicated to understanding and sharing the legacy of Drew McRitchie.

DREW McRITCHIE

Canadian Artist (1954–2021)
Realism · Abstraction · Metaphysics · Consciousness

Drew McRitchie was a Canadian artist whose career spanned nearly five decades, evolving from nationally recognized realism into a deeply considered abstract–metaphysical practice exploring consciousness, perception, emergence, and symbolic order.

EARLY YEARS & FORMATION

McRitchie grew up immersed in art. From about the age of five, he spent long hours in his mother’s studio, absorbing technique, colour relationships, and philosophical ideas about seeing and meaning. Although largely self-taught, this early, intimate studio training formed the core of his artistic foundation. From her, he learned that one of the essential tasks of drawing and painting is the search for the light.

At fifteen, he declined an opportunity to play professional hockey connected to the Toronto Maple Leafs organization, choosing instead to devote himself to becoming an artist.

In 1974, he won First Prize for Drawing at the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition for a rendering of his own hockey pads, titled “Padding 1”

TORONTO EXHIBITIONS (1970s–1980s)

Throughout the 1970s, McRitchie exhibited regularly in Toronto, including multiple group shows at the Nancy Poole Gallery (now Loch Gallery) and at additional venues:

Kensington Arts Association (KAA)
Gallery Soho
Le Cadre Gallery
Toronto City Hall
Additional artist-run and independent contemporary spaces

These exhibitions introduced him to the Toronto art milieu while he developed his early realist and emerging surrealist vocabulary.

VANCOUVER RECOGNITION (Mid-1970s–Mid-1980s)

After relocating west, McRitchie’s work was reviewed in The Vancouver Sun and The Province for its tonal precision, atmosphere, and narrative depth.

Key exhibitions include:

UBC Fine Arts Gallery (Morris & Hellen Belkin Art Gallery) — For the Birds (1977), with Gathie Falk, Jack Shadbolt, Ann Kipling, Liz Magor, Pnina Granirer
Presentation House / North Shore Art Gallery — Realisations: The Romantic & the Realist (1976), with Dorothy Manning
Grace Gallery, Granville Island — The Flow of Stillness (1985)

GALLERY MOOS — TORONTO & CALGARY (Early 1980s)

McRitchie’s association with Gallery Moos marked a major leap in his national visibility. With major locations in both Toronto and Calgary, Gallery Moos represented many of Canada’s most prominent realist painters.

McRitchie participated in several group exhibitions at Gallery Moos Toronto, which introduced his work to influential collectors and reinforced his standing within the national realist milieu.

In Calgary, he was featured in the Gallery Moos group exhibition “Canadian Realism”, shown alongside leading artists such as Ken Danby, Tom Forrestall, Ron Bolt, Les Bachinski, Richard Robertson, and Michael Thompson. His inclusion in this significant exhibition signaled that his technical ability and atmospheric precision placed him firmly among Canada’s top realist painters.

Gallery Moos also highlighted his painting Approaching Storm (1980) in their exhibition materials, identifying him as a distinctive and emerging realist voice.

HARRINGTON GALLERIES, RETROSPECTIVE & TRIUMPH (Late 1980s–1991)

In Vancouver, McRitchie developed a close relationship with Harrington Galleries, who presented multiple exhibitions and strongly promoted his work. Director Ken Swaisland introduced him with the statement:
“Every once in a rare while a new artist will emerge that collectors instinctively know has that special touch which separates great art from good art.”

In February 1990, the gallery mounted a five-year retrospective of McRitchie’s oils and drawings, consolidating his standing among private and corporate collectors.

In 1991, Harrington Galleries commissioned his painting Triumph as the centrepiece of a major national fundraiser supporting the Canadian Special Olympics. The unveiling of Triumph coincided with his solo exhibition Forms and Voids (1991), expanding his visibility and marking a transition toward deeper conceptual concerns.

SHIFT TOWARD METAPHYSICS (Early 1980s–1989)

McRitchie’s turn toward metaphysical and symbolic inquiry began during the height of his acceptance as a realist — not after. While exhibiting with Gallery Moos alongside Canada’s leading realists, several early-1980s works already reveal perceptual ambiguity, symbolic structure, and interior states that signal a conceptual evolution taking place within his realist period.

Rather than a break from realism, this transition unfolds across a cluster of early-1980s paintings in which atmospheric technique becomes a vehicle for exploring consciousness, coherence, universality, and emergent form. Flight from Nescience (1982) is one significant example within this broader arc.

WITHDRAWAL FROM VANCOUVER GALLERIES & FINAL EXHIBITING PERIOD (1990s)

Following the Harrington period, McRitchie gradually stepped back from the Vancouver commercial gallery system, while remaining active internationally for several more years. In 1997, he exhibited at the Los Angeles Art Fair and entered representation with Barakat Contemporary Gallery (Los Angeles).

By the late 1990s, he had largely ceased public exhibition activity, turning instead toward independent philosophical, structural, and experimental work — the direction that would shape his ATUVA and abstract–metaphysical practice.

ATUVA & THE ABSTRACT–METAPHYSICAL PERIOD (1990s–2021)

From the 1990s onward, McRitchie’s practice entered its most conceptually ambitious phase, defined by ATUVA, the artist’s own philosophical framework investigating states of consciousness, symbolic universality, coherence, and the perceptual architectures underlying human awareness. In this period, the pictorial surface becomes a site of metaphysical inquiry: forms emerge as systems rather than objects, and colour, gesture, and spatial tension operate as instruments in a broader investigation of how meaning arises and coheres.

THE MODULAR SYSTEM OF THE OEUVRE

Drew McRitchie’s oeuvre is shaped by a fluid interplay of realism, surrealist imagery, atmospheric abstraction, structural form, text, and hybrid sculptural painting. Surrealism functions as a continuous thread in his visual language—appearing in metaphysical landscapes, symbolic spatial constructions, and the subtle tension between perception and imagination. Across five decades, McRitchie allowed ideas to unfold across mediums and periods rather than within fixed stylistic phases. These conceptual paths overlap, evolve, and re-emerge across time, forming an interconnected body of work rather than a sequence of isolated periods.

To reflect this, the Estate presents his practice through five core ideas:

Nature, Environment, Mind, Motion, and Structure.

Series titles used during his lifetime—such as the Earth Series, Coherence, Morphology, Metamathica, Flow Series, Mask Series, Portrait Series, Little Theatre, Nude Series, and Goddess Series—are understood here as waypoints within these broader, ongoing lines of inquiry, not rigid classifications. At every stage, his work expresses a unified vision in which perception, natural forms, interior states, and consciousness remain dynamically interconnected. A fuller explanation of the Modular System and its application within the Catalogue Raisonné will be available on a dedicated page.

CIRCLISM (Mid-2000s–Late Practice)

In the mid-2000s, McRitchie developed circlism, an ink-drawing method built entirely from microscopic, hand-drawn circles. Distinct from pointillism, circlism generates biomorphic forms, gradients, and metaphysical structures through interconnected circular micro-gestures inspired by surrealist automatism.

ENDERBY AESTHETICS LAB (Late Years)

In Enderby, BC, McRitchie and his partner Mary established an informal aesthetics lab with local artists — a space devoted to philosophical inquiry, experimentation, and the study of consciousness through visual form.

LEGACY

McRitchie left more than 600 works and an extensive archive of notebooks and philosophical writings.

The Drew McRitchie Estate is currently engaged in preserving, digitizing, and preparing the artist’s archive and selected bodies of work for future exhibition and publication. We welcome inquiries from curators, researchers, and institutions interested in collaboration.