Original Paintings + Wall Sculpture
Ryan works in oil-based enamels on board and oil on found materials — metal roofing, wood, objects pulled from the world around him. The paintings are large, bold, and built to hold a room. The wall sculptures extend that same visual language into three dimensions, made from whatever the material called for.
Original Oil Based Pastel Drawings
"When I create drawings, my hand moves and my mind follows."
Ryan has been working in oil pastel on paper for thirty years. Some pieces are spare and immediate. Others build slowly into something dense and layered. The range is wide — from works he made and held onto in the mid-nineties to a thirty-day visual diary kept during his residency at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation's Thread program in Sinthian, Senegal.
The Mohonk Collection
Ryan Cronin paints in response to place. Given time on a property, access to its landscape and history, he makes work that couldn't have come from anywhere else.
The Mohonk Collection is the result of his time at Mohonk Mountain House — one of the Hudson Valley's most storied properties. Lake Mohonk was painted in response to the rainbow trout and the history of a house that has stood since 1869. Tulips came from the Victorian gardens. These are not landscapes in the traditional sense. They are Ryan's visual language applied to a specific place, at a specific moment.
Prints are available for the full collection.
The Senegal Body of Work
In September 2019 Cronin was selected by the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation to spend a month at Thread, the Foundation's residency in Sinthian, a rural village in Senegal. The Albers Foundation selects a small number of artists each year. The Thread program asks one thing of them: spend time in the village, engage meaningfully with the community, and let the work be whatever the work becomes.
Cronin arrived with brushes, plywood panels cut in New York to fit his checked luggage, and six sheets of fine art paper. He found a local enamel called Loubane and made it central to the work. Over thirty days he produced a body of paintings, sculpture, drawings, and collage that pulled the entire vocabulary of his thirty-year practice into a new cultural context, and let the context change what came back out.
The collection includes large-format paintings on plywood, a 48" x 84" modular panel work drawn from a daily market in Tambacounda, a flag piece built from flattened aluminum cans painted in the colors of Senegal, sculptural work made from objects collected on site and transformed back in the studio, a series of collages built from materials Cronin gathered on his daily walks through the village, and 30 Days in Senegal, a five-drawing visual diary of his experience in oil pastel on paper. Some of the work was completed in Sinthian. Some was finished on his return home, with the residency still in his hands.
PARTNERSHIPS + COLLABORATIONS
