Featured Artist Xander Ratledge '22

Many Avonian readers are familiar with the Renaissance man concept—a person who possesses many talents or areas of knowledge. The modest artist Xander Ratledge, a senior from Aptos, Calif., is the first to deny he has talent. However, in the true spirit of a Renaissance man, Xander pushes himself well beyond his comfort zone in several areas of school life, and there he does his best work.

• During a cross country race, running with an injury he hadn’t told his coach about, Xander pushed harder because he knew it would be his last race of the season—and set a personal best by 4 minutes.

• As a freshman, Xander felt some familiar anxieties creeping in when he needed to speak in front of a class, so he signed up for theater to overcome his fear—and took the audience on a crazy ride (literally—he rode a tricycle around on the Adams stage) through his role as A Nasty, Interesting Man / Lord of the Underworld in a production of Eurydice.

• Feeling isolated, depressed, and stuck during the long at-home months of the pandemic, Xander picked up his camera, documented his family’s struggle, and won two Scholastic Art Awards for digital photography: a gold and a silver key.

With this track record, it’s easy for onlookers to think, “Wow, this young man is talented; he excels at everything he does!” Although that may be true, this success is hard-earned and perhaps a bit misleading. On the surface, Xander is a cross country runner, an actor, a photographer, and an academic. However, bubbling just below the facade of a jovial smile every day are feelings of worry and angst that Xander continually battles. “In everything I do, there’s a lot of fighting against my natural inclination to stay quiet and hide. Instead, I choose to be loud, outgoing, and a little ridiculous at times to prove to myself that I make my own decisions, not the doubts inside my head.”

Xander planned to attend public high school as his two older siblings had done, but that didn’t seem like a good option given his past experiences. In grade school, he was subjected to severe bullying, to the point that he dropped out of eighth grade. However, he knew he still needed a plan for high school. “One day, my stepdad mentioned Avon Old Farms School rather flippantly, a boarding school on the other side of the country where his own grandfather had once gone and some distant cousin had once taught,” explains Xander. “I went online to look it up and immediately thought it was better than anything else.”

Xander recalls going to the website and thinking how cool it would be to live inside one of those massive brick dormitories of the Pope Quadrangle. He watched the B-roll of boys walking and talking, smiles illuminating their faces. “They had coats and ties on, which at the time I thought was a bit ridiculous, but I could tell that Avon had structure because of that dress code, which I was interested in,” he continues. “And the vibe of all the students was one of warmth and camaraderie, so I began convincing my parents that I wanted to go there.”

After an on-campus tour during which Xander recalls visiting an engaging Latin class with Jake Spearman—who kept a Nerf gun at his desk to use when kids got too rowdy—Xander was impressed with the comfortable relationships he observed between the students and the teacher. He knew it was a place he could belong.

That fall, he enrolled as a freshman. Armed with a fresh start, he began a journey of self-discovery and reinvention. He took responsibility for his feelings and actions, deciding that he would not let his inner emotions define what he was capable of: he would write his own story. He also took charge of his academics and says that the boarding school lifestyle helped him with that. “I like that I can study in my room, and if I’m lost or confused, I can ask my roommate or sneak down the hall and ask my other buddy what’s going on. I like waking up and being with all my friends, right there. We’re together, always. It’s just really comforting.”

In trying new things, he discovered passions and ways of expressing himself through art when words were insufficient. “Art, in general, is vital for me. I don’t really see any other reason for everything else. Art is how we express ourselves; it’s how I express myself. And whether that’s through photography or through theater or whatever else I might pick up, I like to be able to look into myself and show it somehow. Words are useful to some extent, but when you look at a really good painting and you can see the emotion in the brushstrokes, you can feel that, which is difficult to capture anywhere else.”

Xander’s love of art began with drawing his freshman year, but because he had so many creative ideas, he rarely finished a piece. By sophomore year, he wanted to expand his abilities and enrolled in dark room photography. As a junior, he took digital photography. This past year, during the COVID-19 pandemic, digital photography became a lifeline. Disconnected from friends who comforted him, the sport he had come to love, and the ability to perform at all, depression began to creep back in. Sometimes it was a struggle to get out of bed, let alone go to class online. But Cristina Pinton, Xander’s photography teacher, kept pushing, reminding him to grab his camera.

“It was hard to pick up the camera at first because I didn't know what I wanted to show,” he explains. “But once I figured it out, it was relieving. It let me know that things were OK. The first photo I took was of myself lying in my bed,” shares Xander. “I grabbed the camera, reached up above myself, took several shots, and then edited one to hand in. That was all I needed. I liked what I saw and what it was saying. I was up, and I was ready. I wanted to take more.” Xander used his art to find relief from the tight grip of the pandemic. “It was an acknowledgment of the feelings that I have and that I’m allowed to have them.”

Xander’s award-winning photos came from the same period. Feeling a sense of purpose for his images, he used his skills and his feelings to capture his family’s journey during the pandemic. “My family struggled during the pandemic, especially the little ones,” he explains. “They were out of school and unable to socialize. My little brother is emotional, just like I am; he gets depressed, and he shouldn’t get depressed, he’s just 6 years old. It’s a real hardship for us as a family when he’s not doing well. But I knew what he was going through. I understood it. I photographed him a lot, the dread that he was feeling. In one photo, I focused on the emptiness in his eyes as he watched TV, waiting for something else to happen.”

Xander takes the same approach to the annual poetry recitation competition. He doesn’t just commit a poem to memory: he studies the poet, learns what was going on in her or his life at the time of writing, and puts great effort into understanding a poem’s meaning so he can bring the lines to life and be the poet in that moment. He has plans for this year’s annual poetry recitation contest, which he lost last year by one vote. “I’m really happy with how I did last year, and I’m going to win this year, so it’s fine,” he laughed. “Mr. Dowling gave me a great tip: one student a few years ago began learning his poetry at Thanksgiving, so by the time the competition came around, there was no competition.”

This fall, Xander is excited for a return to normalcy. He is enrolled in AP photography and plans to participate in a play each season, either at Avon or Miss Porter’s, to make up for lost time. “Being able to experience that amount of fear while also having an incredible amount of fun made me more OK with the fact that I will get anxious. At the end of the day, I can do well and enjoy myself on stage, even with the anxiety lingering.”

As he looks ahead to the rest of his senior year and beyond, he’s also enjoying taking some time to look back and reminisce. Before COVID-19 became a household term, Xander enjoyed simple memories of relaxing times at Avon—one was of his first night on campus. After moving in as a freshman, Xander recalls students playing volleyball on Jamerson Green. He went outside to watch and met fellow freshman Yunha Kim. “I sat down next to him on a bench. We just chatted, and we connected so quickly. I felt comfortable. That’s something that I’ll always remember: being there, the sun setting, and me and Yunha just having a chat on a bench. It’s a great memory and one that I’ll hold forever of my time at Avon and how it came to be a place where I found myself, my passions, and my friends.”