SANCTUARY
By Kathryn Ryan
In Sanctuary, my hope is that these paintings are quietly powerful.
Their stillness, light, and space offer an expansive distance while inviting intimacy through intricate and detailed mark-making. They suggest fragility and vulnerability alongside strength and monumental force, uniting opposites to form a harmonious whole. These concerns have endured in my work for the past 40 years, reflecting how our inner lives connect with the natural world, an ongoing inquiry into the essence of things and what matters.
My trees, often set in ambiguous spaces, become metaphors for co-existing fragilities and strengths, the union of opposites, and a search for beauty, calm, and peace. They offer meditation, a slowing down, a way to go deeper, to see beyond, find meaning, and connection. For me, art is both an expressive, creative visual language and a path to a spiritual life, connecting with the natural world.
As a series of predominantly sculptural tree portraits on ambiguous backgrounds, their simplicity masks their complexity. They sit quietly, yet are strong, both powerful and fragile, enduring weather and age. They stand confidently, resilient, marking the landscape with their presence. They punctuate the stillness and space, with light falling and waning, they are markers between distance and closeness. There is simplicity, yet it is refined, elegant, serene, and reduced to what is essential.
An artist’s inquiry is a lifelong venture, seeking to understand and express the essence of being human. The more I reflect and become absorbed in the process and challenge of painting, I understand how and why I create these works. My intention is to
connect our inner lives with the natural world, developing a visual language that mirrors these qualities. This is achieved through intuition and a felt experience as much as intellect.
The balance and harmony of opposites underpin my work, combining delicate and strong, intimate and distant, resilience and what remains, to a unifying whole. It’s relayed through how you paint more than what you paint. Months of patient layering result in a final painting that is evocative, calm, and inviting close inspection while offering vast space. They visually express what remains, balancing the delicate with the monumental.
Being an artist, painting and working in the studio is my sanctuary and provides a place to explore a deeper understanding of our world through a felt and intuitive art practice.
