With an MFA from RMIT University, Melbourne, Nelson based painter and mixed-media artist David Ryan completed undergraduate and post-graduate studies at Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne. With 31 solo shows and 35 curated group shows, Ryan’s work is held in numerous private and public collections throughout the world.
“My work ranges from large scale paintings to works on paper and over scale books, and are often accompanied by vitrines containing models, hermetic maps and fragment like relics. With a close, disciplined observation of the natural world these works are signs of passing, a camp site left existing only in the travellers memory. My work begins with the simple act of walking and concerns events perceived while walking, with responses to the terrain of the southern alpine regions of New Zealand.”
The observation and reconstruction of a journey is one of the constants in my work, whether they are registered as paintings, notations, maps, charts, diagrams, books or in video animation, electronic sound, and installations. They are emblematic of an alternative way of perceiving the world.
Works on Paper
In emulation of 19th century explorers, surveyors, amateur adventurers and artists, the mapmaking and topographical images begin as sheets of paper joined together with surgical tape and kept in a back pack whilst travelling. In the retrieval of visual cues all made of elements from direct observation there is no perception that is too small or mundane not to invite close attention.
Paintings – oil on canvas
What appears as a conventional landscape reading is a partial one for there remains much that is undisclosed. Despite my interest in place and the elemental aspects of weather, rocks, water and ice, the paintings become a negation of the actual experience – an obverse reflection, an act of disappearance and represent something other than what is there. This points to our ultimate failure to embrace or comprehend nature. Despite this the result of attempting to persist in identifying with the perceptions of an ever fleeting natural world may be a form of wisdom.