I did learn from him though. He and Wulf Barsh von Benedict would give me theory articles to read. I was a good student then (a phrase which really 'means I read them'). One of the things Ryan harped on the most was taste. He would come in every morning with a liter of diet coke and crack something about how I was short (he's 6'2"), then he'd sit down for a couple minutes and give his lecture about whatever had pissed him off in the last 48 hours.
I have to make a side note here: you know how there are certain teachers you gravitate towards? Makayla knows, certainly, because she gravitates back to Dr. Cronin. Well, that was me and Ryan. I took Observational Drawing from him. Then the senior illustration course on gesture drawing. Then Intermediate Life Drawing. He pissed me off every single day, and yet at the beginning of every class, I was ready to face him again.
One day he sat down on the edge of the model stand with a stack of papers and handed them out. It was an article called "A Note on Taste." Actually, it was a section of a chapter, "Tone and Colour Design" in a book, Oil Painting, which I'm going to guess is by someone relatively old. Anyway, whoever wrote Ryan's inspiration of the day said that taste is determined by familiarity, and that good taste can be developed. What really seems to sum it up is the last sentence of the chapter, which says:
All good artistic work is new; but its newness is of the inevitable sort that naturally grows from sincerity; not the forced newness for the sake of difference, which characterises so much of the peculiarity that in theses days masquerades as originality.His point in the whole thing was that it isn't so much about being as it is being while meaning something. And while someone can develop a taste for something, that doesn't mean the antithesis can't exist. It also means that on the individual scale, good and bad are entirely relative, but on the grander scale, they are definite. There is such a thing as skill, and whether one possesses it or not will determine if they are good or bad.
Ryan was huge on that because here's something of a little secret: art is not just about the idea. It has to have one, but there has to be a structure. I like to think of it as language. Movements change it, but it is rooted in a place that it draws upon for stability--for definition. The thing is, once you know what good art really is, crafted through study and reflection and skill, taste is redefined.
The hard part about writing this post is that I didn't drop everything and go to Florence. I stayed. I wont lie, there are days I sincerely wish I had gone. But what really sobers me is that Ryan taught me so much about life, art, humanity, God, and myself that it seems almost like I owe him something. It is a similar feeling towards Mully; but the fact is, Ryan shared what he felt and what he knew to be true on a daily basis. And some days he was completely off. I wont lie--he's an arrogant conceited jerk...but usually he was right. Ryan inspired me to be a great person. I studied every reference he gave me. I aimed as high as I could with every line until I stopped caring. And he said to me that June day in his studio, "Look at you! You're coagulating right in front of me! I don't know what happened to you, but pull yourself together. You don't even get dressed for the day."
I could hate him for that day. But the thing that I've realized as I sit with Makayla and discuss her relationships with Cronin and Muhlestein is that I miss every second of Ryan's influence in my life, and that I will always regret the day I walked out of his studio and never went back.
I didn't draw this. This is a photo of Ryan.
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