Abbey McCulloch

“I have always been fascinated with ‘mud maps’ and the iconic nature of the ‘landmark’ choices individuals make when sketching diagrams to explain where they are, and where they want to lead you. My maps give inkling to the journeys I have made: the totemic images signify directions to my house, my ideas, my reality.”

Robert Ryan 2007

Mud Maps is a wonderfully uplifting exhibition which pays homage to the maxim that an artist must live always in the first person and bare witness to his own experience. A rich and profound synthesis of cross-cultural pictorial traditions, the works document Robert Ryan’s wayfaring through landscapes of place and consciousness, in times both past and present.

As if soaring aloft, the viewer gazes at earth-toned surfaces alive with shifting light and linear activity. Quite unlike the self-contained narratives common to Western art practices, these paintings are multifarious, mutable and unbounded. Ryan understands that the human, man-made and natural worlds are intrinsically related in cycles of becoming, maturation, disintegration and resurgence. The works seem more akin to elaborate tapestries than mud maps scratched in the dirt!

Aesthetic power rises from the multiple layers of both media and intent. On close inspection, a myriad of intricately patterned motifs and “mini-portraits” illuminate the artist’s personal stories. Avoiding illusionist effects in favour of a stylized, intentional flatness, Ryan’s imagery is less descriptive than archetypal. Compositional complexity is channelled and given direction through grids of branching vines, meandering byways and arterial highways that slice through the Subdivision of Bangalow’s tropical arcadia or define McLaren Vale’s now enormously prosperous Wine District. Mud maps for the north coast’s emergent ‘sea-change’ villages cannot yet exist muses Ryan. All blue-grey and impassive, Blueburbia must wait for time and habitation to create its own totemic markers.

Balancing order and chaos, personal identity with psychological distance and materiality with concept - Rob Ryan’s paintings offer access to an endless passing from inner to outer and back again. Ever the contrary and enigmatic painter, he wryly comments: “If you see the man praying under a tree, you’ve gone too far!”

JACQUELINE HOUGHTON

Now resident in Suffolk Park, in northern N.S.W., Robert Ryan has lived and worked in places as diverse as Dublin, Milan, Africa, Sumatra and the Maldives. He has a Diploma of Visual Arts, North Adelaide School of Arts 1993 and is the veteran of at least twenty-five solo shows - Mud Maps is his seventh with Schubert Contemporary. Ryan’s work is represented in the Microsoft Collection, UK; the Bailey’s Art Collection, Dublin, Ireland; the Gold Coast City Art Gallery; the Tweed River Regional Art Gallery; the Tea Tree Gully Tafe, Adelaide and the Regency Park Tafe, Adelaide. Numerous awards include: the Tweed River Regional Art Gallery Acquisitive Prize, 1999, 1995 and 1993: the Bailey’s Art Box Prize,1997; the National Acquisitive Award, MacArthur Print Prize,1996; the Byron Shire Printmaking and Drawing Prize, N.S.W. 1996; the Southern Cross Art Prize - Popular Award for Landscape, Ballina, N.S.W.