I was born in New York Hospital in New York City on August 6, 1957. My mother, Natalie, was from New York, and my Father, Howard, came from Wilmington, Delaware. Until I was 1 year old my family lived in Bronxville, just north of the city. We then moved to the town of Sea Cliff, on Long Island, where my great-grandparents on my mother’s side, the Beller’s and the Levi’s, had had summer homes.
Sea Cliff in the late fifties and early sixties was a small, quaint village located on the north shore of Long Island, about 25 miles east of New York. Parts of the village had been built up earlier in the century with beautiful Victorian houses. After the second world war, with the growth of the suburbs, other parts of Sea Cliff were populated with modest houses on quiet streets lined with old maple and locust trees.
One of my earliest artistic recollection is of waking up from a nap, when I was two or three, seeing a print of a portrait of a lady with dark hair (by Modigliani) hanging in the room, and thinking it was a picture of my mom. Years later I remembered this and realized that the original must have been painted long before she was born.
I went to Sea Cliff Elementary School. I played with my cousins and best friends, Jonathan and Guy Spencer. Their mother, my Aunt Barbara was a sculptress and print maker, as well as a Jungian analyst and guidance counsellor in the local school system. She was my first artistic influence. I learned to ride a bike on their tennis court, made ‘mud dams’ in the garden and carved stone in Aunt Barbara’s studio. In first grade I discovered the joys of doodling. Jonathan and I drew spaceships on our Formica desktops. Our first grade teacher, Miss Corn, never scolded us for this.
When I was 9 we moved to Edgewater, Maryland, near Annapolis. My brothers, Peter (3 years older) and Matthew (6 years younger) and I went to the Key School, a small, alternative private school, founded by professors from nearby St. John’s College. I studied the conventional grade school curriculum, plus French with native French speakers, ancient middle-eastern and Mediterranean history with Monsieur Balladie, an expatriate Egyptian, whose love for his former country was very strong, and in 7th grade, solid geometry with Mr. Cone, and Homeric Greek with Mr. Peter Perhonis.
I was fascinated by Egyptian art and architecture, ancient Greek history, polyhedra (3-dimensional geometrical forms), and the etymology of words. I loved to read. I also played keep-away (mêlée with a football), basketball, enjoyed waterskiing and ping-pong.
Outside of school I spent a lot of time with friends, especially Christopher Borden, whom I met in 4th grade on his first day at the Key School. We are still close friends.
When I was a kid I watched a lot of television: ‘I Love Lucy’, ‘Gilligan’s Island’, professional golf, stock car racing, and old black and white movies, etc. In the evenings, at dinner time, the whole family watched the CBS evening news with Walter Cronkite. I learned about the Vietnam war, saw footage of the riots in Chicago at the 1968 Democratic Convention, remember the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. I listened to the Beatles on the AM radio. I became aware of the intensely dynamic, changing world, lived under the threat, like everyone else, of nuclear war, and probably like all children, imprinted inwardly everything I experienced.
In 1972 I went to prep school in New Hampshire, at the Phillips Exeter Academy. My favorite class was biology, which I took in 10th grade from Mr. Polychronos. I also studied Greek philosophy and in 12th grade, Buddhism and existentialism. I continued to doodle and after high school went to the Rhode Island School of Design. After a year I dropped out of college and went to work as a lathe operator at Brown and Sharpe, a machine tool company in North Kingston, Rhode Island. I worked there for three years.
After I graduated from high school I began to read books on psychology, especially those of Carl Jung, and religious literature, such as the I Ching, Light on Yoga (B.K.S. Iyengar), Be Here Now, Tales of the Hasidim (Martin Buber) and The Autobiography of a Yogi (Paramahansa Yogananda). Later, I read the Old Testament. From reading Jung I developed an impression of the mind as being deeply stratified, with superficial and deep layers, the deeper layers, the ‘collective unconscious’, functioning in a strange logic of images (strange at least to the conscious mind) that resonate with the imagery of ancient religious cultures. Through my reading of religious works I saturated my mind with ancient images and stories. From this experience I developed an admiration for story tellers. Later, when I began to teach drawing and painting, I realized that just under the surface of my mind I had lots of images, anecdotes and stories which would pop up spontaneously.
In the Fall of 1979, when I was 22, I quit my job at Brown and Sharpe and rode out of Providence, Rhode Island on my second-hand bike, bound for Santa Fe, New Mexico where my friend Chris had a job in construction. It took me 7 weeks to ride from Providence through Albany, Niagara Falls, Detroit, St. Louis, Dalhart (Texas) and Tucumcari (New Mexico) to Santa Fe.
I lived in Santa Fe for 3 years, for the first two of which I worked in a natural foods coop. My third year in Santa Fe I worked part time at a variety of odd jobs and devoted myself to figure drawing. I went to every drawing group I could find. I took my first oil painting class, an 8-week, one-night-a-week, still-life painting class at a local art supply store.
In January, 1983 I moved back east, and on the 17th of that month enrolled in classes at the Art Students League of New York. That evening I met Ted Seth Jacobs and became his student. I studied with Mr. Jacobs for six years, both in New York, and at the École Albert Defois, Mr. Jacob’s painting school in France. In October 1983, in painting class I met my future wife, Celeste. We were married in 1986.
Mr. Jacobs approach to painting, which he calls ‘Restructured Realism’, was a natural fit for me. To borrow a phrase from Jung, there seemed to be a synchronistic convergence happening between the teaching and my mind.
In April, 1985 Mr. Jacob’s asked me to substitute teach his figure drawing class for the remainder of the school year. (At this time Mr. Jacobs lived half the year in New York City and half the year in a little village in the Loire Valley in France. In the early 90’s he moved to France permanently.) I worked as Mr. Jacob’s substitute in New York for the remainder of his time there. This was the beginning of my teaching career. From the first, I enjoyed doing demos: drawing and teaching and telling stories. It came naturally. I was surprised later to hear that some teachers don’t like to talk while they paint and draw!
At the end of summer, 1989, Celeste and I said goodbye to Ted Jacobs. It was the end of our studies with him. In September we moved out of New York City, back to Santa Fe. In the evenings, two nights a week, with a couple of friends, we hired models and drew. I felt like I still needed to work on the block-in. Later, I began painting portraits of the models we hired.
After our arrival in Santa Fe I worked as a silversmith’s assistant. In 1992 I taught a drawing workshop for the Academy of Realist Art (now the Gage Academy of Art, Seattle). For the next 15 years I taught drawing and painting workshops in Santa Fe and all over the country. In 1998 I wrote and illustrated The Artist’s Complete Guide to Figure Drawing, which has sold over 50,000 copies since its publication. In April 2006 a group of twelve students met with me in my studio and asked me to start my own school. With their help and encouragement the Ryder Studio opened on February 12, 2007.
