The "Branches" series follows Ritchie’s current practice of training artificial intelligence programs called generative adversarial networks (GANs) to produce unrecognizable yet strangely familiar configurations from which paintings are intuitively developed. Although they were originally based on computer programs, the paintings evoke sources drawn from nature. They echo the root monsters found in multiple folk traditions, including the Green Man of Ritchie’s Celtic ancestors and the work of East Tennessee folk artist Bessie Harvey, as well as the vegetable-face assemblages of Giuseppe Arcimboldo and frottage rubbings of Max Ernst. They are born of the same tendency to see something human in an inhuman source and then emphasize the anthropomorphic features through art–a kind of call-and-response process.