It’s Day 76 and progress on the roof is going well.  Still a couple more days (or this week) until it’s complete.  Then it’s painting the outside of the house!  Whew.  Speaking of painting…join me in honoring Anne Ryan today.

Anne Ryan (1889 – 1954) belonged to the early generation of New York School Abstract Expressionist artists.  Her first contact with the New York Avant-garde came in 1941 when she joined the Atelier 17, a famous printmaking workshop that the British artist Stanley William Hayter had established in Paris in the 1930s and then brought to New York when France fell to the Nazis.

The great turning point in Anne Ryan’s development occurred after the war, in 1948. She

was 57 years old when she saw the collages of Kurt Schwitters at the Rose Fried Gallery, in New York City. She right away dedicated herself to this newly discovered medium. Since Anne Ryan was a poet, according to Deborah Solomon, in Kurt Schwitters’s collages “she recognized the visual equivalent of her sonnets – discrete images packed together in an extremely compressed space.” When six years later Anne Ryan died, her work in this medium numbered over 400 pieces.

Biography from wikipedia.

Biography below is from http://www.karlie.com/anne-ryan.html.

A true Renaissance woman, Anne Ryan, born in 1889, chose eventually to live a Bohemian lifestyle in Greenwich Village with such neighbors as Jackson Pollock, Hans Hoffman, and Barnett Newman. Influenced by these innovative artists and the creative atmosphere surrounding her, she eventually honed her own painting skills and techniques, producing abstract paintings that personified her life and beliefs.

She was born in Hoboken, New Jersey to a wealthy Irish family in 1889. She attended a

Catholic convent school and then St. Elizabeth’s College, but left in 1911 before graduation to marry William Mc Fadden, a law student. However, Ryan could not immerse herself in a traditional marriage. Her temperament and, at that time, an impulse to write, required a wider and more diverse circle.

After three children and many separations and reconciliations, she left the marriage in 1923. By 1931, Ryan traveled with her children to Spain to broaden her scope as a writer. In 1933, she returned to Greenwich Village and continued to write. In this milieu, she was increasingly exposed to the excitement and vision of gifted, young artists who were defining themselves in entirely new, abstract ways. Ryan responded to this and at age of forty-nine began to paint.

Fellow artists such as Hans Hofmann and Tony Smith encouraged Anne to develop her own style and experiment. Ryan’s first formal training was at Atelier XVII, the studio founded by Stanley William Hayter. Here she observed mature artists at work and became immersed in technique. She explored automatism and surrealism. She created work that reflected the contemporary art scene of the 1940s.

Throughout her career, Ryan switched media, creating paintings, wood-block prints and

painting-like collages that reflected her unique character and the richness of her life experiences. By the early 1950s, these works were shown in New York at Betty Parsons Gallery and were included in the 9th Street Show and the Museum of Modern Art’s “American Painting and Sculpture” in 1951.

Ryan’s work abruptly ceased in 1954 when she died of a stroke at sixty-four.

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I obviously decided to do a collage piece in honor of Anne Ryan.  I’ve been really looking forward to doing an abstract expressionist collage piece and here it is.

I started by cutting pieces of colorful fabric and adhered it to the canvas.

After waiting a bit for it to dry, I picked out various colors of paints to paint around the

fabric.  It was like quilting without the sewing part!  Very relaxing.  I’d like to experiment with this more in the future, but maybe change the choice in colors and add different mediums.

Well, I hope you enjoy my piece for today and I’ll see you tomorrow on day 77.  Best, Linda