True Ryndes

In 1968, following his graduation from Dickinson College, True taught agriculture as a Peace Corps Volunteer in a remote village in the foothills of Nepal.

Returning to the U.S. in 1970, he worked for four years with the Hawthorne Dominicans, an order of Roman Catholic sisters serving terminally ill cancer patients.  Armed with that experience, True embarked on what was to become a 35 year career as one of the pioneers of the North American hospice movement.  During that time he became a “first generation” nurse practitioner with a Masters in Public Health, functioning as a clinician and executive in emerging leadership hospices.  He has served on the boards of national organizations and think tanks dedicated to advancing dignified end of life care.  Upon his retirement in 2007, he was awarded the Hospice Founders Award by the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization.

2007 marked the end of a meaningful First Act: Service.   Act Two has been more self directed:  Art.  Shortly after his retirement he began to take classes and workshops from classically trained artists who’d been painting for decades.  While he acquired the techniques to paint representational work, he has however always been more interested in the poetry of abstract art.  His teachers’ lessons about composition, perspective, color theory and light values are, however, in the forefront of his mind when working on pieces such as those on display here.

True paints nearly every morning in his Mount Soledad studio in La Jolla.  Subscribe to his website for announcements of new work and exhibitions:  www.trueryndes.com.

As a precisionist, I have enjoyed discovering my relatives in the long span of world art, individuals who philosophy professor Agnes Callard calls “partners in inquiry.”  Alone in my studio, I draw on their artistic lineage and hard-edged vocabularies.  It feels like artists of the last century, such as Kazimir Malevich and Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, as well as First Artists in distant millennia have become spiritual influencers. My recent interest in luminous energized straight lines happens at a time when all that was straight and smooth in my younger body is succumbing to the wrinkles and slump of time.  i inhabit those straighter lines, and they me.  

Like those earlier partners, I pursue a sense of composure, using arresting geometric forms and narratives.  Even when the images are still, something is happening:  they are neither static nor mute.  Shadows are falling, angles unfolding, squares are emerging or receding.  The inferred meanings of the images change with the lives of their viewers, day by day.  Their quiet dynamism causes them to live well.

CA

USA