TOM RYAN

While many of the artists who virtually re-created the tradition of western American Art in the middle and later years of the twentieth century largely turned their attention on history, others built their careers around the West that they could travel to, work in, and record on a daily basis. Charlie Russell began his career as an artist by recording the cowboys and life on the open range that he himself lived. Later on he turned more of his attention to the history of that same area, but he always retained an interest in depicting the contemporary life of the cowboy. His domain was the Judith Basin of Montana and he recorded the life there to such an extent that it came to serve as a metaphor for the entire West.

The Montana range of Charlie Russell’s West has a modern counterpart in the work of Tom Ryan, who has created that same metaphoric landscape from a single, albeit sprawling, ranch in West Texas, the historic 6666. The ranch has been Ryan’s artistic world for over four decades. He knows the people there intimately —the land, the work, the daily routines, as well as the sometimes extraordinary incidents of modern ranch life. He was not born to the range; he arrived there well after he had begun his career as an artist. However, his skill at capturing cowboy life is so authentic that many people assume he has himself been a working ranch hand. In a sense, Ryan combines the traditions of both Charlie Russell and Frederic Remington. Like Russell, he has created a large body of work directly drawn from real people and a real place. He has created a universal vision of the world by focusing on actual individuals whom he has observed at close range over several years. Like Remington, he is an observer of that life. While he has spent many days on horseback photographing and sketching the cowboys of the 6666 Ranch, he has never assumed nor led anyone to believe that he was one of the cowboys himself. He came to the ranch as an artist, and has constantly returned because it has become the source and the catalyst for his art.

Ryan was born in Springfield, Illinois in 1922. By the time he entered high school, he had already earned a reputation as an artist among his peers. He enrolled in Washington University in St. Louis to pursue an engineering degree, but soon left to join the art program at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts. After a stint in the Coast Guard in World War II, he followed up his early artistic training at the American Academy of Art in Chicago and then the Art Students League in New York. His training and contacts in New York, which included such luminaries in the illustration and art worlds as Harvey Dunn, Harold Von Schmidt, and Norman Rockwell, lead to a prolific career as a book cover artist. His book covers for western subjects alone number over 300 works. In 1957, he and his artist friend, Bud Helbig (both artists would later become members of the Cowboy Artists of America) traveled to cow country in Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma, and Colorado. It was on that trip that Ryan decided to record the modern West as a primary pursuit. A few years later, in 1963, he made his first trip by invitation to the 6666.

From the beginning of his experiences on the ranch, Ryan has been keenly aware that by recording the day-to-day activities of the work there, he is in effect producing an historic record. His paintings depict a life that has already seen dramatic changes, a life that will eventually change as completely as the one that Russell documented on the open range of the Judith basin. The fact that Ryan has been there over the course of the last four decades with camera, sketch book, and easel, means that while the actual people and events will pass, the record will not. Just as Russell’s work has preserved the historic era and place in which he lived, Ryan’s work will remain as a living testament to the lives and work of real people. Years from now, students of history and aspiring artists alike will be able to mine this tremendous visual archive. Both will be able to learn much from Ryan’s work.