other works
I currently have a solo show at the Keeble & Schuchat gallery
And, I'll participate in Silicon Valley Open Studios in May
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| 4.18.08 | |
Ryan will be participating in Silicon Valley Open Studios in May.
He will be showing at a site with two other artists, Jaki Ernst (artist books, watercolor prints, and mail art) and Stephanie North (jewelry).
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| 4.15.08 | |
Ryan has a solo show at the Keeble & Schuchat Gallery in Palo Alto
The show, called Flora, features 47 photographs focusing on the abstract beauty of trees and flowers. The show
includes many works from his series of "Tree Portraits", "Flora", "Color", and "Vita".
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Flora. Keeble and Schuchat Gallery, 290 California Ave., 2nd Floor, Palo Alto CA. April 15 - May 22, 2008.
Silicon Valley Open Studios, 247 Velarde Street, Mountain View, CA. First three weekends in May, 2008.
The Small Show. Modern Book Gallery, 494 University Ave, Palo Alto CA. June 6 - July 29, 2008.
Solo Exhibitions
2007 Vita. The Media Center, 900 San Antonio Rd., Palo Alto CA. February 1 - March 31, 2008.
Vita, Elizabeth Norton Studio, Palo Alto CA.
2006 Mysteries, Elizabeth Norton Studio, Palo Alto CA.
2005 Stanford Law School, Palo Alto CA.
2004 Peninsula Open Studios, Mountain View CA.
Peninsula Open Studios, Mountain View CA.
Institute for the Future, Palo Alto CA.
Silicon Valley Open Studios, Palo Alto CA.
Essences, Foster City Art Gallery, Foster City CA.
Oak Creek Apartment Club, Palo Alto CA.
Therapeutic Massage Center, Middlefield CT.
Mitchell Park Library, Palo Alto CA.
2003 Peninsula Open Studios, Mountain View CA.
2000 Stevenson Coffee Shop, Santa Cruz, CA.
Group Exhibitions
2007 Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk: A Century by the Sea. Museum of Art and History, Santa Cruz CA. July 14 - September 4.
Capturing Light. Norton Gallery, Palo Alto CA. August 2 - 27.
2006 Bay Area Annual, Sanchez Art Center, Pacifica, CA.
Keeble and Schuchat Gallery, Palo Alto, CA.
2005 Photography: A semiannual survey of new work in photography. SFMOMA Artists Gallery, San Francisco CA.
Monochrome. Norton Gallery, Palo Alto CA.
Contemporary Abstracts. Alameda Art Center, Alameda CA.
Photo San Francisco. Fort Mason Center, San Francisco CA.
Recent Works. Two-person exhibition. Bryant Street Gallery, Palo Alto CA.
2004 Insight. Norton Gallery, Palo Alto CA. (Honorable Mention)
Affirmative Abstraction. Sun Gallery, Hayward CA.
Contemporary Abstracts. Alameda Art Center, Alameda CA. (Award of Excellence)
Green Tea Invitational. Artisans Gallery, Mill Valley CA.
Photo and Sculpture. Pacific Art League, Palo Alto, CA.
Experimental. Pacific Art League, Palo Alto, CA.
Shadows and Light. Pacific Art League, Palo Alto, CA.
2003 Preview 2003, Herbst International Exhibition Hall, San Francisco CA.
Selected Awards and Honors
2006 Photograph Genesis published in the magazine Shift.
2004 Silicon Valley Open Studios Stars Program.
2003 Finalist in the N4C PhotoFest print competition.
Ryan Bush has been creating art for more than 12 years. With his abstract style of photography and painting, he explores the beauty hidden in everyday objects, the sacred hidden in the profane.
Ryan Bush was born in Port Huron, Michigan in 1973. He moved with his family to
Durham, Connecticut, and then went to Swarthmore College, in Pennsylvania, where
he majored in Linguistics and Russian. Later, he received his Ph.D. in
Linguistics from the University of California at Santa Cruz, and has been living
in the Bay Area since 1995.
Ryan showed a strong interest in art since childhood, and first became involved with photography in college and graduate school. Photography quickly evolved into a passion for him, and he developed an abstract style with which he explores the beauty hidden in everyday objects. He is drawn to images that carry a certain meditative quality. Part of this is achieved by using a sparse language of geometrical shapes, lines, and rhythms. Furthermore, he often uses a narrow tonal range, so that the images are either overall dark or overall light, resulting in images that are contemplative, rather than emphatically assertive.
The literal subject matter takes a secondary role in Ryan's photographs, allowing our associations to come to the forefront. He aims to leave behind the question "What is it", and let the images transcend their subject matter to symbolize something else. The profane is merged with the sacred, and the mundane is transformed into the mysterious.
He works with a Hasselblad medium-format camera, and produces archival pigment prints with an Epson inkjet printer. He has also printed extensively in the darkroom, and produced camera-less photographs by scanning directly on a flatbed scanner.
For information about specific series of Ryan's work, you can read the following artist statements:
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Representation I am represented by the following galleries: |
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| Palo Alto, CA: | Bryant Street Gallery 520 Bryant Street Palo Alto, CA 94301 T: 650.321.8155 gallery@bryantstreet.com |
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| San Francisco: |
SFMOMA Artists Gallery Building A, Fort Mason Center San Francisco, CA 94123 T: 415.441.4777 artistsgallery@sfmoma.org |
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Direct sales You can also order photographs, paintings, and decorated eggs directly from me.
For photographs, the prices are:
ryan at ryanbushphotography dot com
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Other Artists
Other
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P.O. Box 2301
Los Gatos, CA 95031-2301
Phone: 650.766.5854
Email: ryan at ryanbushphotography dot com
You can also join our mailing list, to get occasional exhibition announcements and information about new work.
This other world is one of calm and tranquility, measure and grace and consciousness. As I become increasingly committed to spirituality and meditation, I turn to that vast world within that has the antidote to the frantic pace, ignorance, and suffering of the ordinary world.
The photographs in this series offer views of that other world - faint and intangible, perhaps unfamiliar, but also calming and reassuring. Some images are darker and more assertive, like the over-active waking mind still encumbered by faults and complexes. Other images are more light and ethereal, as consciousness expands and negative emotions are replaced by positive ones. In the lightest photographs we may even get a hint of the end of suffering.
I strive for a restrained feeling of grace and poise in these photographs, like the smile of the Buddha. The language I use is one of simple forms, curves, and lines, bathed in tones that are light, low-contrast and monochromatic. While the foregrounds and backgrounds at first appear to be undifferentiated grays, on closer inspection they reveal subtle variations and textures. Asymmetrical arrangements and objects barely glimpsed in the margins help to remind us that we're not necessarily seeing everything -- with expanded consciousness, things might look completely different. The flattened two-dimensional space further distinguishes the world of the photograph from our ordinary world.
While I associate these images with meditation, the literal subject matter is much more humble, tar on asphalt. Beauty is everywhere, often literally underfoot, just waiting to be seen. In some respects, these photographs are a collaboration with the workers who painted the tar on the asphalt to fix the cracks. On the other hand, the photographs also owe a debt to artists that have inspired me, including Aaron Siskind, Franz Kline, Ellsworth Kelly, and Harry Callahan. We are all part of a vast web of cause and effect, and no one knows where the strands we add will lead…
I use a medium-format Hasselblad 205 camera, which gives me complete control over all aspects of the exposure, as well as the freedom to concentrate on the more creative aspects when I need to. Older prints were taken with a 6x9 Mamiya Super 23 camera, or with a 35mm Pentax ME Super. Almost of all of my pictures are taken using a tripod, with slow, fine-grained film.
After I create the negatives, I digitally scan them into my computer. A few pieces involve a fair amount of digital editing, but most do not differ very significantly from the original negative. I give the images a slight warm cast, and print them digitally in editions of thirty-five as archival pigment prints. This combination of digital and traditional photography gives me the greatest degree of artistic control and image quality.
I am naturally drawn to rhythms, tensions, and balance. Light and dark, sharp and curved, textured and smooth... I am fascinated by the interaction between opposing elements. A small dark shape packed with energy can be enough to counterweight an entire field of light. Or as a smooth arc slices across a solid, static background, it brings the background to life as it passes. A photograph is like a mobile - constantly balancing and counterweighting and dancing.
Some photographers that I draw inspiration from are Harry Callahan, Imogen Cunningham, Aaron Siskind, Brett Weston, and Ralph Gibson. I am also inspired by the music of minimalist composers like Philip Glass and John Adams. I have even been known to bend people's ear drawing parallels with Chinese calligraphy.
I use a medium-format Hasselblad 205 camera, which gives me complete control over all aspects of the exposure, as well as the freedom to concentrate on the more creative aspects when I need to. Older prints were taken with a 6x9 Mamiya Super 23 camera, or with a 35mm Pentax ME Super. Almost of all of my pictures are taken using a tripod, with slow, fine-grained film.
After I create the negatives, I digitally scan them into my computer. A few pieces involve a fair amount of digital editing, but most do not differ very significantly from the original negative. I give the images a slight warm cast, and print them digitally in editions of thirty-five as archival pigment prints. This combination of digital and traditional photography gives me the greatest degree of artistic control and image quality.
This series gets its name, Impromptus, from the musical pieces of the same name. The photographs are meant to appear improvised and spontaneous, and some are whimsical while others are introspective. The photographs explore the tension between order and chaos, between apparent spontaneity and careful underlying composition. The simple white backgrounds let the range of lines and rhythms take the forefront, like a solo piano alone on the stage.
These photographs are pared down to the core essence. They avoid familiar and easily-recognizable features, like telephone poles, which would keep the image too closely tied to the everyday and the mundane. The use of asymmetric, marginal compositions was originally inspired by Harry Callahan, and some of the rhythms were inspired by Piet Mondrian. The scale and spatial orientation is ambiguous, and the flattened two-dimensional space further distinguishes the world of the photograph from our ordinary world.
The images are captured using a medium-format Hasselblad camera, then scanned digitally. A few pieces involve a fair amount of digital editing, but most do not differ very significantly from the original negative. They are printed in editions of thirty-five as archival pigment prints.
At an obvious level, the paintings have the structure of a fugue in that they take a theme and repeat it in various ways. They also share the
meditative, introspective qualities of the musical antecedents. Furthermore, the structure of 24 different pieces, one for each major and minor key,
gives shape to the series, suggesting a transition from one painting to the next.
(On a side note, Shostakovich's Preludes and Fugues also hold a sentimental
place in my heart because it was the first music he learned to play on the piano. While renting an apartment in Tbilisi, Georgia, there
was a piano available, and the Shostakovich was the easiest sheet music he could find. So, that's the first music I taught myself. I don't recommend
that as a pedagogical method, though!)
All paintings are oil and charcoal on canvas. I start by doing a rough sketch on the canvas in charcoal, then paint over it with a thin coat of paint so the charcoal shows through slightly. As I continue to add layers of paint, I draw on top of the paint with the charcoal, playing with the interaction between painting and drawing, between line and plane.
The name of the series comes from classical music, where a scherzo is generally a fast, energetic movement. While working on these paintings,
I listened to Anton Bruckner's symphonies a lot, particularly his Symphony #8, which are full of a similar energy to the paintings. Scherzos
are also typically characterized by three beats per measure, which reminds me of the format of these paintings. They generally involve curving
lines, and the number three is also a 'round' number; many of the paintings are square, and in a scherzo the quarter note or eighth note (both of
which are 'square' numbers) get the beat. The paintings, exploit the complementariness and tension of square and round.
All paintings are oil on canvas.
This series of photographs celebrates the lifeblood of nature, to which we must remain connected for both the Earth's sake, and our own. I am fortunate to live surrounded by wonderful ancient oak trees, and they have helped me to reconnect with nature. By working so closely with the leaves, I have a newfound appreciation for the strength, diversity, and wonder of nature. Too often we don't appreciate the beauty of the trees, or we only see the beauty of the whole tree. There are more worlds of beauty waiting to be discovered in the leaves themselves.
I strive for a restrained feeling of grace and poise in these photographs, to reveal the mysterious beauty hidden inside the everyday. The language I use is one of simple forms, curves, lines and textures, often low-contrast and monochromatic (here, only using shades of green, rather than black and white). Like Harry Callahan and Ellsworth Kelly, I often favor asymmetrical arrangements and objects barely glimpsed in the margins as essential parts of the compositions, helping maintain the dynamic feeling of balance. Meanwhile, like the Abstract Expressionists I use a flattened two-dimensional space to further distinguish the world of the photograph from our ordinary world.
I created these photographs by placing the leaves on a flatbed scanner, and scanning them directly. It was a new experience for me to make photographs without a camera, but the process lends itself well to zooming in on very small areas of the leaves, and let me very quickly adjust the photograph and redo it when need be. A few pieces involve a fair amount of digital editing, but most do not differ very significantly from how the original leaves looked. I print the photographs in editions of thirty-five as archival pigment prints.