Overview
Ryan Bush has been creating art for more than 8 years. He started with black and white photography, and in 2005 started oil painting, but in both media, his style is abstract expressionist, involving the tension between geometric elements, organic forms, and subtle gradations of light and darkness.

For information about specific series, you can read the following artist statements:

  • Anaphora
  • Preludes and Fugues
  • Scherzos
  • Mysteries
    • Biography
    Ryan was born in Port Huron, Michigan, in 1973. He moved with his family to Durham, Connecticut, in 1983. He went to Swarthmore College in southeastern Pennsylvania, and majored in Linguistics and Russian. While at Swarthmore, he took an introductory art course, and a course in Art History. He started using a camera while at Swarthmore, and took a number of pictures during his junior year studying in Voronezh, Russia, and after his senior year while traveling in China. At the time, though, he was just using a simple point-and-shoot camera, and wasn't concentrating exclusively on artistic photographs.

    After graduating from Swarthmore in 1995, he went to the University of California, Santa Cruz, to get a Ph.D. in Linguistics. His interest in photography continued to grow during his first year there, and he bought a used Pentax ME Super. He spent the summer of 1996 in the Republic of Georgia doing linguistic research, but also made a lot of photographs, focusing more and more on artistic expression.

    During the rest of his graduate studies at Santa Cruz, he continued to develop his photographic skills, and started working in the darkroom. He got some tips from some friends of his, and read some books such as An Ansel Adams Guide, but had no formal instruction. His first show was in 2000 in a coffee shop on campus.

    After Ryan received his Ph.D. in 2000, he started working in high-tech, at a company called BeVocal. For the next two years he continued to improve his skills behind the camera and in the darkroom, honing his vision and focusing in on the abstract style that he uses today. Then he started exhibiting more in public, starting with Peninsula Open Studios in 2003, and culminating in a show at the Bryant Street Gallery in Palo Alto, California.

    In early 2005, Ryan was inspired to start oil painting. One reason was that he had been feeling increasingly confined by the medium of photography, chiefly because it was difficult for him to find subjects that could be used to show what he wanted to show. The second, more immediate reason for his starting oil painting was that he traveled to Europe, and was inspired by the wonderful museums of Dusseldorf, Koln, and Amsterdam. So, in February he started oil painting, and the result is the two series Preludes and Fugues, and Scherzos.

    Recently, Ryan has moved to digital photography, which allows him to combine the best of both photography and painting. In his new series, Anaphora, he combines various negatives together, basically painting with photographs. That gives him a new way of achieving his abstract vision in an inherently representational medium, and opens up another world of possibilities.

    Influences
    Ryan has been influenced by a wide number of artists, including Piet Mondrian, Ellsworth Kelly, Richard Diebenkorn, Franz Klein, Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, and Imogen Cunningham.

    In addition, though, Ryan acknowledges many influences outside the visual arts. Classical music is very important to him, as you can tell from series' titles like Preludes and Fugues, and Scherzos. His favorite composers include Phillip Glass, John Adams, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Anton Bruckner. Other influences include James Joyce, Joseph Campbell, Jungian Psychology, Chinese calligraphy, and life, the universe, and everything.