Bjørn Rye

1942-1998

Born in Los Angeles in 1942, Bjørn Rye was brought up in Utah, where he worked on his father's lumber mill, rode in amateur rodeos, and explored the mountains on his horses Tuck, Bright Eyes and Honeyboy. His first job was helping to drive a herd of cattle over Diamond Mountain to the railhead in Lone Pine, Wyoming.

Immediately following his high school graduation, he began a period of travel, learning and adventure, returning first to Los Angeles, and later living in San Francisco, Florida, New York City, Athens, Munich and London.

He received his BA degree, magna cum laude, from Columbia University in 1973, with a major in Art History. At Columbia he studied with Rudolf Wittkower, Ernst Gombrich and Howard Hibbard, among other eminent art historians. A year later he received an MA degree in Creative Writing from New York City College, where he studied closely with novelists Anthony Burgess and Joseph Heller, and won a prestigious DeJur Award for the best first novel of that year.

His novel The Expatriate appeared and was followed by A Feast of Pikes, both published by Bobbs-Merrill to critical praise. For the next decade or so Bjørn divided his time between art, writing and teaching at New York's School of Visual Arts. During this period he published many interviews and articles, and combining his interests in writing and the visual arts -- was a critic for Artforum Magazine.

Returning in 1989 to California, Bjørn began to paint landscapes, though his interest lies less in topographic rendition than in a continued pictorial meditation on the weight of art historical, symbolic and formal allusiveness that landscape can hold. In the words of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, "There remains, at last, only a tree on a hill, to be looked at day after day."

Bjørn painted from a hillside Santa Barbara studio with an inspiring view of the town and ocean. He taught landscape painting at the Riviera Fine Arts Center, and was recently Production Artist for the Savoy Pictures/Andrew Davis film Steal Big/Steal Little. In January, 1996 he received a California Arts Council Grant for landscape painting. A number of his paintings were reproduced in the book Ranchos, published by the Easton Press in December, 1996.

Bjørn was diagnosed with stage three esophageal cancer in December, 1995 and was one of the original members when the EC-Group was formed that same month.

Bjørn died in August, 1998.