Longtime Dallas Art Fair director Kelly Cornell leads this year's Aspen Art Fair at the historical Hotel Jerome in July. Among the invited galleries, HESSE FLATOW returns to Aspen with textural landscapes by painter Jonathan Ryan.
Houston-based art advisor and the gallery's former sales director Carroll Cummings visits with Ryan about his artistic practice:
Carroll Cummings (CC): Jonathan, I've deeply admired your work since my time at HESSE FLATOW, and as someone from Texas, I've watched it find a strong audience among Texan collectors. What has the evolution of that relationship between your work and its audience felt like from your perspective?
Jonathan Ryan (JR): I felt it begin when I started showing with HESSE FLATOW, partly because of the gallery's relationships with collectors and advisors there, but it also coincided with a meaningful shift in the imagery of my paintings. My work is rooted in my experiences of the strange, vast desert landscapes of Southern California and the Southwest. I have a vivid memory of doing a motorcycle trip across Texas about twelve years ago, riding from east to west across the entire state. The scale of it stayed with me-how geographically and culturally diverse it is, and especially the deserts in West Texas, where the roads feel infinite, and the sky seems almost impossibly large.
CC: As you prepare to exhibit with HESSE FLATOW in Aspen once again, what feels distinct or new about the body of work you're bringing to this year's fair?
JR: My practice has come a long way since I last showed in Aspen. At that time, I was just beginning to incorporate imagery and a deeper pictorial space into the paintings.
Now the work feels untethered in the best possible way. My command of color has also deepened over the years, through an involved process of weaving many transparent layers atop one another. The paintings depict strange landforms and unusual atmospheres, and they function as meditations on memory and experience: time spent in the world, and time spent with art and images.
