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Born in 1975 in Park Ridge, IL, United States 1994-97, New York Studio School, New York, NY 1993, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY |
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"Looking at the world around has always been a fascination. Sun coming through fall colored leaves, a girl squatting down to pick up a dime, wild flowers growing on the side of the freeway, an old friend looking like a complete stranger for a moment, people falling in love, being born, dying; all ask to be painted. My reply has always been ‘how?’ Though I have no idea of how to go about it, each painting gets a little closer to being right.
I tried to paint from just the observed world, but it is not what I wanted. There seemed to be much more than just imitating sight. When our daughter was born, I was overrun with demands from everything around me. I could no longer hide. While making toast in the morning or changing a diaper at night, everything reminded me that I had to paint something new, something better and more accurate. To make paintings that really express the reality of being a human. My whole body seemed to be saying ‘go beyond. Go past everything you have done, and do it well. This is all you have. This is what is asked of you.’ Slowly, images started to emerge into the paintings. The images were from imagined sources, and no longer from a model or a still life situation. These images could now tell a story more accurately. They took me closer to making a more clear and defined work. Even though they were invented, the imagined elements seemed to be more real than the elements that were copied from nature. These elements found their way into my studio so that is where I first painted them. Sometimes a character would stand next to a trashcan or in front of some random stretcher bars. This seemed to disrupt what I was trying to get to. The worlds of the imagined and the perceived have not yet found their way together. They always looked as though they were each occupying their own space and not existing together in one unified whole. I tried a different approach, and traveled into the fictional element from where the images came. With that as a starting ground, new things began to happen, and a brand new world was discovered. The guidance of Mozart’s ‘Magic Flute’ made this crossing possible. Within the opera the strangest things happen, one after the next, in a sequence that seems to make very little sense. Throughout the story, people are thrown into a variety of different situations. I found myself able to relate to the nonsense by comparing those events to ones in my life that made very little sense. I started by painting certain scenes and the people in them. By doing this I found that I no longer had my studio as a stage, but had to invent a completely new platform from which to build. By having to create a new world, I had to re-evaluate everything that I thought I knew. This threshold that I crossed has left me lost in a world that is absolutely foreign. There is no turning back now. I would like to create a metaphor of everyday life by making something that is real, like the way a familiar object fits into your hand. I would like to make a place that is full of tangible things that are recognizable and true. To create a space where everything makes sense, but no one understands how it works, where the whole becomes a transcription of man and what we all go through. I desire something like that, something that is real and is made of paint."
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Selection of works from Ryan seng |
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