Infinite Amount of Images

“My process is a chain of discoveries. It’s a long interaction where I capture things I find on the canvas or paper, and develop them. I avoid critique at every step. The work feels so lifeless when I can see exactly how I made a piece. A feature of 21st century engagement with art is the impossibility to isolate work. It can be compared to an – for all intents and purposes – infinite amount of images available online, and inherit lines of critique that are dead weight to the experience. I had to take down all the scraps and clippings from other artists’ work that I’ve gathered over the years because they were suffocating my studio. So we can choose to dialogue or to discover, and the latter seems to lead to the real dialogue we want in the first place. I have to be in a specific mood to make those discoveries, and I know quickly when my time in the studio is going to be fruitless.” [Julie Ryan on painting]

“A painting is perched on an easel in the corner, and affixed to the wall are a handful of double-sided paintings on paper. Black-and-white with odd-shaped cut-out forms, they’re emblematic of her former nomadic lifestyle. A couple of larger paintings with partial ceramic frames—part of a series inspired by European bathhouses—hang nearby. They’re so dominated by lines, they almost look like drawings on canvas, though pinks, blues, yellows, and muted grays manage to work their way in, inspired by the misty colors of European saunas. “I think part of the practice of making the paper pieces is they’re mobile,” she says. “Having the space in the Navy Yard, it moved to large scale paintings. That’s a privilege. That changes everything. That changes how you make work, how you’re perceived in the art world, and it’s different than having everything in your pocket.” [Laura Itzkowitz on Julie Ryan]

“Ryan plays with ideas about abstraction, as the faces become more about the surface than the content. She puts three abstract pieces, including one of her own, a painting called “The Tour,” on the wall. In the context of the mural behind it, Ryan’s engaging abstract painting starts to look representational. Broken into three main areas of brush strokes and colors, the upper left side, mostly just a series of horizontal lines, becomes a face, echoing the female face peering from the wall just behind it.” [Amy Griffin on Julie Ryan’s The Crayon Miscellany]