TONY RYDER

Anthony (Tony) Ryder teaches art at his studio in Santa Fe, and is an internationally prominent realist painter and teacher. He talks like a writer in that he makes his points through analogy like good descriptive writers.

Today he’s critiquing Tina and talking about “posters,” little light studies done with oil paint preliminary to the final painting: “You have to take a ‘snapshot’ of Trevor and match it with your poster.” Or, “You can take a snapshot of your poster and compare it with a snapshot of Trevor. The two must look pretty much alike.” His exposition is so clear that I can visualize what he wants the poster to look like.

The brush must be just hard enough not to smoosh the paint around. The paint must be applied in well organized chunks. Highlights must be put on, with just the right value and hue, over “form light.” The forehead slants toward the light, and is more strongly lit than its first cousin, the cheeks, which slant a little toward the light, but not as much. The average of the values in the beard is closer than you might think to that of the cheeks, although the hue is different. Somewhat like a vase, the nose goes from broad at the nostrils to narrow at the bridge where is flanges into a base above the eyes. The highlight on its tip is brighter than the one on the bridge. But the average of the nose’s values and hues is not unlike the cheeks’.

Tony is more at peace, more fluid, more lucid than any of the hundreds of art teachers I’ve come across. He is as gentle as Josef Albers was sadistic. “A good teacher is a sadist,” Albers would say, and his disciple Sy Sillman strove mightily to emulate the master; many a student left his class in tears. On the other hand, Tony’s students come from all over the world, and never want to leave.

JOHN REGER

My first impression of John’s painting-in-progress was one of clarity. I looked at it the day before the end of term, and my take then was that it resembled a carving out of stone or marble. Some brush strokes were still exploratory, with hard edges that might have made me think of stone fragments. The brushstrokes in the blue backdrop, the white fabric and the floor – those section would not be finished -- had the look of chisel marks in rock.

As I thought then, the figure and surroundings resembled a rock quarry strongly lit by the sun. The drawing is so rigorously correct that it appears to have been chiseled out of a rock, where, like the figures of Michelangelo, it had “preexisted” in perfect form. Muscles flow most convincingly and as if smoothed out with a chisel. The model finds symbiosis with the lighting. His white skin glows like a lamp The clarity of the light is further accentuated by the contrasting softness and shadowiness of the face and shoulder area. The strength of the body that the muscles depict matches perfectly the strength of the rendering.

Then John emailed me the final work, which I saw differently. The figure appeared softer, more warmly colored, and more like flesh. My earlier sense of a rock quarry had largely, but not entirely, to do with the white fabric behind Adam and the white patches on the floor.

I’ve always been impressed by John’s feeling for human anatomy, a bit reminiscent of the passionate, “near sighted” nude explorations of Phillip Perlstein (especially in regard to the warm and cool “jingle” of color in the legs, in this case). Unlike Perlstein, however, John is a classical realist, despite how much of the thoroughness and tactility in his personality gets conveyed in his paintings.

BIRD

Bird is her name, and I have yet to discover the reason why. Is she named Bird after Charlie Parker? Does she like to chase birds? I’ll try to find out before my work stint is over.

Bird is a boxer mix, honey-brown, with short hair. She’s powerfully built, but with surprisingly narrow hips. She walks stiff-legged and not fast. You’d think she’d want to show off those strong muscles doing athletic things, but she’s very laid back instead.

Her right arm below the knee is pure white, while the left is white only on the toes. Her underside looks as if somebody poured milk on it from front to back so that puddles oozed out to the sides. From her eyes to her nose, however, is very dark…like those people who trim their beards close to the skin, while leaving the dark stubble.

She wanders around the studio, seemingly bored. She’s what Caesar Milan would term calm and submissive. She’s almost somnolent calm.

I gave her a tiny piece of pizza once, and she came up to the podium where I sat, hoping in vain for more. Today, she came up again, smelling my lunch, which contained nothing savory, and was mostly fruit. When asked if she ate papaya, her owner confirmed that “she doesn’t do fruit.” So what the heck?

Bird knows that she’s not permitted to lie on the couch, which is behind the artists. Only I see her ease into it smooth like butter. When I smile at the spectacle, she’s quickly and effortlessly dispatched by her human, Jacob.