48" x 48" Oil On Board
Painted on a large scale in Ryan’s typical square format, Colorful Geese is suggestive of a polaroid picture or an Instagram square. Depicting a quick snapshot of a fleeting moment, the work shows the migration of a flock of geese. With minimal rendering and a simplistic approach taken towards each individual bird’s form, the geese appear flat. While the work suggests movement and is in many ways very physical, the clean line work and lack of detail leaves the animals in a sort of limbo with no grounding to their background. Painted in bold and highly saturated colors, the work is suggestive of traditional sign-painting, whereby the geese appear as almost swatches on a cool blue sky. While Ryan frequently explores animalistic forms in his smaller scale works and more commercialised items, such as tableware and clothing merchandise, this departure towards a natural theme has a unique twist in his larger scale paintings. Often testing the limits of line and color, much of Ryan’s paintings examine household fixtures such as showers and tennis rackets or classic emblems of American culture at its peak in the 1950s and 1960s.
