Raye LaRive was Born and raised in New Jersey, Raye studied figure drawing and painting at the Art Students League of NY from the age of 11.  She has a BA in Ceramics and an MFA in Painting, and taught perspective drawing, color theory, artistic anatomy, and painting for over 35 years at the Smithsonian Associate Program, the University of Maryland, and Walter Reed Army Medical Center.  She has a lifelong admiration for the WPA Social Realism and Mexican Social Realist painters. Arriving in Santa Fe in 2018, the expansive landscapes and turbulent skies of the Southwest occupied her attention.  More recently, she has migrated into abstraction, but continues in the same small format and monochromatic media.