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Many
an English artist, especially the landscape painter,
feels the urge to migrate to other climates when spring,
summer or autumn comes around. I am no exception. Yet
as a young man I found Cornwall, Wales and Suffolk sufficient
for many years for my needs, apart that is, from the
mandatory visits to Paris. Ah Paris! For forty-three
years I have had a studio in London but in all that
time I have neither drawn nor painted more than a handful
of pictures of our capital. However the moment the train
pulls into the Gare du Nord my eyes open wider and out
comes my pencil and sketch book. To me even the shabbiest
Parisian hotel with a top floor room and no lift is
as near to heaven as an artist can get. The view from
the attic window of ridiculous roofs with their assorted
chimney pots is nectar to my muse not given to me in
London or Penzance!
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When
times change, the landscape changes and the urban scene
changes, and the fashions and appearances of people
change, but fish remain the same. The same as the Romans
painted at Pompeii, as the Dutch painted many centuries
later, and as Courbet painted in his prison cell at
Chalon later still.
Fish
lie before the artist with their sad eyes and fading
colours, but in death - as in life - fish are beautiful.
No two herring or whiting, however humble, are identical
and each has its own character, as shown by the placing
of two or more together. It is the poetry inherent in
their uniqueness and agelessness that the artist hopes
to portray, driven to follow along the path of his illustrious
forebears. He does not have the passing clouds and the
waving trees of the landscape to excite him, nor the
fashionable look or posture of portrait sitters to help
his composition. His painting must be simple and unadorned.
He is painting the face of his own fate, from which
he learns that death too has a beauty of its own.
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Man is not a camera. The object of painting
is not to copy but to express one's delight in the colours,
shapes, forms and relationships of the objects of one's
contemplation.
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'In the matter of paint Ryan has learnt most from Soutine
... His [Ryan's] prolonged contemplation is reflected
in the incredibly rich texture of any given area of
canvas. As we look into these mixtures we are aware
that the forms have evolved out of the handling of the
paint itself. Such identity of ends and means precludes,
on the whole, that imaginative failure so typical of
English painting, the failure to fuse the poetic idea
and its pictorial statement. The vehicle of Ryan's poetry
is Ryan's colour and form.'
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He
enjoyed beautiful things and saw beauty where others
might not dream of looking; his pictures reflect this
and manifest his unusual way of seeing things during
a life fully lived. By the age of twenty three he was
handsome, rich and already quite well known and by the
age of sixty three he had three wives, three daughters,
no family fortune and was almost unheard of among the
art buying public. Only the discerning collectors who
had owned his work for years and who had had the sense
to hold on to it still believed him to be the best kept
secret in the art world.
In
between, pleasant to relate, he enjoyed himself and
was true to himself: he was a figurative painter and
he never compromised this view. He had integrity, intelligence
and didn't seem to have many regrets. Towards the end
of his life as more modern audiences began to catch
up with him, he began to sell again.
There
are many stories about him, most of them true. Adrian's
principle fault was modesty which made him all the more
delightful to be with. It was always a pleasure to listen
to him talking and what he said was well worth hearing,
invariably witty and seldom unkind. His paintings are
the same; looking at them you can sense different aspects
of his charm. The longer you look, the more they yield.
He used a lot of paint in lyrical ways that aren't necessarily
obvious at first. They aren't about mystery. They are
about poetry, which, like Adrian Ryan's art, comes from
the heart and is meant to be lastingly beautiful.
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Adrian Ryan is an objective painter remarkably
free from contemporary obsessions. His eyes are directed
towards the forms and landscapes we all know, and he
is more concerned with their reality than with the reality
of his own responses to them. However, in looking at
his work, we soon realize that he likes what he sees,
he likes a contrast of pure colour, he likes the feel
of paint. When he is most successful his pleasure in
the visual world becomes infectious and the whole canvas
seems to be bursting into flower under the spectator's
eye.
Now such exuberance, at least in painting,
is most un-english. In the last hundred years I can
think of only Turner and Matthew Smith as painters who
have attacked the canvas with real gusto... by returning
to the palette of the Post-impressionists and the Fauves,
Adrian Ryan seems to illuminate the waste lands of English
painting.
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...it is here in the method of artists
like Adrian Ryan, that the paradox is to be found. The
painting cannot be realized without intense, exacting,
almost scientific observation, but he inserts a poetic
filter, so to speak, between this objective eye and
the action of the brush on the paper. The result is
pictures where feeling is supreme, poetry rather than
science.
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When
I was first asked to write about Adrian Ryan I hesitated,
because for a painter to write about another painter
he has his own vision in the way, but Adrian has that
rare gift of being a painter's painter. He does not
talk from any pulpit of theory but from the paint directly
on the palette and the brush rooting about in it, which
you can hear because the sounds still stay with
the tension and apprehension of the impossible task
of throwing a sunset or lighting a moon over a French
village where a sinister curé walks alone. Painting
a church like a Titan in the sky. No wonder the shouting
eye is nervous and wants to screech with excitement
when suddenly it is done, and silent beauty of the moment
is before you with honest facility of a true painter.
Even a great painter, if greatness consists in content
of a haunting beauty like an opium dream, as in his
paintings of Mousehole, or the wonder and awe of moonlight.
[Adrian]...
always seemed to be smiling at a joke he never got round
to completely telling - it was life. Always generous and
kind, a fine painter with a touch of Soutine that betokened
a macabre streak. He could paint a calf's head fresh from
the butcher, day after day, until it was teeming with
maggots, yet produce a landscape as gentle to the eye
as a Ruysdael. A painter whose every brushstroke is the
centre of the universe he is creating.
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