Chris Rywalt crywalt@crywalt.com

I'm going to dispense with the usual third-person biography and write this like I'm writing a personal letter to you. Because I like you.

December 19, 1970, I was born on the north shore of Staten Island, the southernmost and least populous borough of New York City. That makes me a New Yorker to the rest of the world but in New York itself I may as well be from New Jersey. I'm told I showed aptitude for many things when I was young -- I taught myself to read when I was two, was great at math, started drawing as soon as I could write -- but I don't remember being all that great at anything. By the time I began attending the prestigious Stuyvesant High School on 15th Street in Manhattan, I was surrounded by people who were smarter and better than I was at almost everything. I liked it that way. I'd rather work up to the people around me than drop down.

I graduated from Stuyvesant in 1988 and went to college at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. I met my wife Dawn there on the third day of classes and we've been just about inseparable ever since. In 1992 I graduated with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science.

In 1993, still working in the Computer Center at Stevens, I was introduced to the World Wide Web. Immediately we put up our own Webserver and began putting things on it for people to see. Back then the Web was short on content so we concentrated on pages with actual stuff rather than just pointers to stuff. Across the continent Jerry Yang had a page that was just pointers to stuff. He is now worth billions of dollars and those of us who actually made the Web interesting? We're all paupers.

While Jerry was making his ungodly fortune I was working on pages on Buckminster Fuller; editing an electronic version of the Principia Discordia and adding to it; designing Web-based games like Apple Corps; and putting together various smaller projects, all of which you can access from my old home page. None of them made me rich or famous but I love them all just the same.

Meanwhile I continued to paint and draw. In 1998 I switched to oil paint from airbrushing watercolors. I never looked back.

In 2001 I began to sell drawings and paintings on eBay. Between then and 2003 I sold over two hundred works. Then I took some time off from selling. In early 2006 I returned to selling on eBay as well as going to gallery openings in New York. I am now concentrating on painting and drawing full time. To this end I've shown in a couple of group shows in the northern New Jersey area and one honest-to-goodness New York City show.

As of 2010, things are somewhat slow.