- compositions
- vita
- meditations
- mysteries
- color
- man-made
- miscellaneous
- flora
- tree portraits
- writing the divine
other works
My solo show in Pacifica opens this Friday, April 9th, and a group show at the New Mexico Museum of Art opens April 16th.
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Solo Show in Pacifica
Ryan will have a solo show at the Sanchez Art Center in Pacifica, CA, featuring 18 works from his Writing the Divine series, and 6 works from his Compositions series. He was awarded the exhibition by the juror at last year's Arts on Fire exhibit, Jacqueline Pilar.
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Art on the Edge at the New Mexico Museum of Art
Six photographs from Ryan's Compositions series will be featured in a seven-person show at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe.
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Solo exhibition at The C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco
Ryan is showing 19 of his photographs, highlighting the mysteries hidden in the world around us. The show includes abstract images from the natural world, as well as the man-made.
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Art on the Edge, group show at the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM. April 16 - August 1, 2010
Solo show at Arts on Fire, Sanchez Art Center, Pacifica CA. April 9 - May 9, 2010
Solo show at The C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, 2040 Gough St., San Francisco CA. Through May 29, 2010.
Group show at List Gallery, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore PA. June 4-6, 2010
Solo Exhibitions
2009 Preludes and Fugues. Red Rock Coffee, Mountain View CA.
2008 Flora. Keeble and Schuchat Gallery, Palo Alto CA.
Silicon Valley Open Studios, Mountain View, CA.
Vita. The Media Center, Palo Alto CA.
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
2009
John Cleary Gallery, 2635 Colquitt, Houston Tx. September - December.
27th Anniversary Juried Membership Exhibition Houston Center for Photography, Houston TX.
Arts on Fire, Sanchez Art Center, Pacifica CA.
23rd International Juried Show. Visual Arts Center of NJ, Summit NJ.
Annual Auction Houston Center for PhotographyHouston TX.
Photo LA. Los Angeles CA.
2008 Winter White. Modernbook Gallery, Palo Alto CA.
Invitational Show. Intel Corporation, Santa Clara Campus.
Bay Area Annual 2008. Sanchez Art Center, Pacifica CA.
The Small Show. Modernbook Gallery, Palo Alto CA.
Figurative. Pacific Art League, Palo Alto CA.
How I See It. Norton Gallery, Palo Alto CA. (Honorable Mention)
Water and Reflections. Pacific Art League, Palo Alto CA.
Abstract. Pacific Art League, Palo Alto CA.
Photo LA. Los Angeles CA.
2007 Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk: A Century by the Sea. Museum of Art and History, Santa Cruz CA.
Capturing Light. Norton Gallery, Palo Alto CA.
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 mundane.
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. Some of his sources of inspiration are Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, Richard Diebenkorn, Franz Kline, John Adams, and the Kronos Quartet.
For information about specific series of Ryan's work, you can read the following artist statements:
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Representation Ryan is represented by the following galleries: |
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| Palo Alto, CA: | Modernbook Gallery Please contact them for any inquiries in California about the Compositions series. 494 University Avenue Palo Alto, CA 94301 T: 650.327.6325 info@modernbook.com |
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| Houston, TX: | John Cleary Gallery 2635 Colquitt Houston, TX 77098 T: 713.524.5070 info@johnclearygallery.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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You can also contact Ryan directly for inquiries:
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 composers like John Adams and Philip Glass. 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.
I am particularly drawn to the musical connotations of the wires because of my musical background, playing the flute in orchestras for a number of years and being a passionate devotee of classical music. I see many similarities between the rhythms and movement of music and photography. In particular, the photographs in this series remind me of the solo piano music of Erik Satie, such as his Gymnopédies, and of John Adam’s concerto for electric violin, Dharma at Big Sur, each of which lend their names to a movement in my series.
In addition to the musical themes, these photographs explore the notion of intersections, the contrast between order and chaos, and the tension 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. The scale and spatial orientation are ambiguous, and the space is mostly two-dimensional. These photographs also have a spiritual component, exploring the sacred mysteries hidden in the mundane man-made wires.
The images are captured using a medium-format Hasselblad camera, then scanned digitally and printed at 20” x 20” as archival pigment prints. I use a textured paper and float the prints in the frames, creating an end result that resembles pen-and-ink drawings. By blurring the distinction between photograph and drawing, the prints play with notions of internal reality (imagined and then drawn by hand) versus external reality (captured with a camera).
The images are based on phrases that have been particularly meaningful to me in my thinking about spirituality. I write the phrases over and over again, meditating on their meaning. After filling up a number of pages with a repeated phrase, I stack the sheets on top of one another and photograph them lit from beneath, so you see layer upon layer showing through. Each layer of words adds meaning and echoes what came before, but also partially obscures the original message. In the same way, as spiritual ideas are passed down through time, layers of interpretation and reinterpretation are built up, until the result may not match the original intent.
The photographs only show small parts of the writing, so the full phrase cannot be read. Even individual letters may be difficult to make out due to the multiple layers of writing, or because some phrases are written in other languages, like Russian or German. The difficulty in reading the letters and words reflects the difficulty we have in understanding the divine, and in describing it in words. When we let go of the literal meaning, other levels of meaning have a chance to appear.
Many of the photographs are light, reflecting the airy, ethereal nature often associated with the divine. Other photographs, however, are darker, because there are other sides to our relationship with the divine, as in John Donne’s “Batter my heart, three person’d God… That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new.” Or in the lyrics of the pop singer P!nk, “Ave Mary A, where did you go? How did you know to get out of a world gone mad?” Darkness is an essential part of the human condition, and of our relationship with the divine. And, darkness helps us to better understand the light.
I was fascinated to see how some of these photographs echo ones from previous bodies of work, such as my Compositions series of electric wires, or my Meditations photographs of tar painted on asphalt. Some other sources of inspiration include the painters Richard Diebenkorn, Brice Marden, and Cy Twombly, the music of John Adams, Steve Reich, and J. S. Bach, and Karen Armstrong’s book The Case for God.
The images are captured using a digital medium-format Hasselblad camera, and printed at 20” x 20” as archival pigment prints. I use a textured paper and float the prints in the frames, creating end results that resemble drawings, bringing the viewer closer to the original writing, and one step closer to the divine.
This series of oil paintings was initially based on photographs that I took of tar painted on asphalt to patch over cracks. I wasn’t happy with the photographs themselves, but through a process of abstraction and repetition, I ended up with the paintings that you see here.
The name of the series comes from a stunning series of pieces for solo piano by the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich, called 24 Preludes and Fugues. The prelude serves to lay out a theme or themes, and the fugue explores that theme by having the theme repeated by various voices, overlapping each other. Shostakovich was harking back to Joseph Sebastian Bach's equally stunning series The Well-Tempered Klavier, which was based on a similar pattern.
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.
Shostakovich's Preludes and Fugues also hold a sentimental place in my heart because it was the first music I 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 I could find. So, that's the first music I taught myself. I don't recommend that as a pedagogical method, though!
All these 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.
After I completed this series of paintings, I revisited the photographs that had inspired these paintings, the photos of tar on asphalt. I saw them with a fresh eye and a freer approach, which led me to find new ways to create abstract photographs, resulting in my 2006 series called Meditations. These paintings played a key role in my development as an artist and a photographer, and I look forward to continuing the dialog between photography and painting in the future.
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.