Vin Ryan - Artist
Vin Ryan is a Contemporary Visual Artist from Sunshine Victoria and has been making Art for about About 15 years, you can check out his web details at www.vinryan.com.au
What are you currently working on?
I’m doing a very large drawing of a nature strip tree in my neighbourhood. It’s part of a series of drawings called Tree Game, which I’ve been doing for about 4 years. The tree drawings continue a long held interest in beginning a drawing or a series of drawings with some sort of unintended/ arbitrary social gesture. In the case of the Tree Game drawings, the arbitrary gesture is made by a council arborist who prunes the top out of the tree to accommodate the overhanging electricity wires.
I like the fact that when I begin one of these drawings, a certain amount of intervention has already begun. As an artist, I’m orchestrating some sort of unintended collaboration and the slow, detailed rendering of these trees that I do is meant to throw these initial arbitrary acts into stark relief.
I like the idea that within the shapes I render in these drawings, there might be some unintended, absurdist or subconscious intent - topiary of the collective unconscious perhaps.
Did the place where you grew up have an influence?
For the first few years of my life I lived in small country towns. Then we moved to Dandenong in the outer suburbs of Melbourne. My dad didn’t want to move there really. He hated the suburbs. This has always made a big impression on me. Without realising it I was always encouraged to think of the environment I lived in as being without value.
We had Heidleberg prints of the bush all over our house. We had anthologies of bush poets like Banjo Patterson and Henry Lawson. We had biscuit tins and place mats with Pro Hart landscapes on them. My dad created a beautiful but bizarre native garden with a seven foot high fence at the front to block out the traffic noise. When I showed an interest in drawing and painting, my dad starting giving me photographs of landscapes to copy. He was trying to encourage me but I secretly hated doing them without really knowing why.
I still remember the shock of seeing a reproduction of a Jeffery Smart painting when I was about 14. It had never occurred to me that you could make art about suburbia. I’d always loved the environment around where I lived but I didn’t know you were allowed to make art about it.
Do you have a personal description of “Art”?
Thoughts plus emotion. That’s the best I can do.
Working towards an exhibition, is it a daunting task?
Solo shows certainly are. There’s a lot of stress and planning involved but also a lot of physical work and effort. The making of the work isn’t as much of a stress nowadays but I still find it difficult to coordinate all the other stuff – transporting the work, marketing etc.
All artists seem to have struggles, tell us about any you have had.
I have Multiple Sclerosis and Rheumatoid Arthritis. This sometimes makes art making more difficult because of pain or energy levels. On the other hand, I think the adaptations I’ve had to make to my working practice over the years has actually made my work more interesting and more contemporary.
Do you hope the viewer will “get” what you are trying to communicate or do you feel compelled to spell it out to them?
I love the fact that once your work leaves your studio you no longer own it in a sense. The artist statement next to a work is of limited value in my opinion. It can give the work a bit of context, but it shouldn’t direct the viewer too much. You don’t expect to see an artist statement if you go to see a band or a film and I don’t think Visual Art is any different.
Respond to the notion “Art is a device for exploring the human condition”… The human condition? I never know what that term means. I’m much more comfortable focusing on specific things or situations and then stepping back and trying to see a broader meaning or context. I think ‘the human condition’ is just one of those terms, which is thrown around a lot and I suspect nobody really knows what it means.
What is the most unexpected response you’ve received from a viewer of your work?
I was standing in front of a work of mine once and a guy came up to me and said “wouldn’t you love to meet the c#^t who did this and just smash his face in?”
Some artists are more “at home” isolated in their creative process, while others revel in being part of a group to bounce “ideas off” how about you?
I used to love locking myself away in my studio but as I’ve gotten older, my studio practice isn’t enough. I’ve had days in the last 5 years where the studio has seemed like quite a depressing and lonely place. When I feel like this, I tend to go outside and go for a walk. A lot of my ideas for art works come when I’m walking. I like the fact part of my work happens whilst I’m out in the world, not couped up in my studio all the time.
At different times I’ve really enjoyed collaborating and bouncing ideas of other artist. For a couple of years I was a board member at Conical Gallery in Fitzroy. You can’t put a value on that sort of experience. You’d get to see the way that an artist exhibits their work from their initial written application right through to opening night. Sometimes you’d have lengthy conversations with the artist whilst they were setting their show up. You felt as though you were part of their creative process.
I’ve also been involved in a few collaborative pieces. I don’t like doing it too often, but collaborating can really take you out of your comfort zone and give you the opportunity to do some things you’d never do otherwise. For instance, I did what was supposed to be a drawing collaborative piece with the artist Richard Lewer at Ocular Lab Gallery. When we got there Richard suddenly decided he wanted me to sing some songs based on the text in his wall drawing. I found myself composing some songs and then performing them to a room full of people.
What advice would you give to an artist just starting out?
I think I wasted quite a few years when I was starting out as an artist because I didn’t take myself seriously enough and I didn’t exhibit my work. As soon as I started to exhibit regularly my whole focus shifted. When you show your work all the things you don’t like about what you’ve done seem to be magnified. They’re right there in your face and you’re forced to do something about them. Showing also forces you to become less of a perfectionist and accept the perceived flaws in your work.
I think it’s easy, particularly as an art student, to tell yourself ‘what I’m doing now is finding my feet, experimenting. At some point in the future, I’ll start doing my real stuff, my exhibition standard stuff’.
It took me a long time to ignore this voice and tell myself ‘what I’m working on now could be the best thing I ever do and I plan to exhibit it this year’. If I had my time over I’d listen to this voice right from the very beginning, whilst I was still an art student.
Can you respond to this quote “Anyone who is half assed about art should get out.” (Janet Fish).
I sort of know what she means but I don’t like those kind of heroic platitudes. The way that I do yoga is a bit half assed but it doesn’t mean I should stop doing it. If you want to make a career out of being an artist you probably can’t afford to be half assed about it, but that applies to almost everything. Some of the best work I’ve seen has a laid back, almost lazy quality to it. Does that make it half assed?
It’s funny, I love some of Janet Fish’s early paintings but I find her later work a bit conceptually ‘half assed’. She’d probably think the same way about aspects (or all) of my work if she ever saw it. I’m not sure what that proves.
Your artistic practice is quite diverse, from installations based on fragments of notepaper pages to large detailed drawings of trees. Can you tell us a bit more about this diversity?
Working in a variety of media and a variety of different ways just seems to make sense.
At any given time I usually have one main thing I’m working on. It might be a large drawing or a table sculpture. In the background, there’s a whole lot of other ‘things’ that I do everyday. They’re things so imbedded in my everyday routine they don’t really even feel like art most of the time. Some examples are: for about ten years I’ve been looking for and collecting hand written notes I find on the ground whenever I walk somewhere; when I’m walking in the city I buy notes from people who are asking for money; every day when I read the newspaper I collect photos of people yelling or people covering their faces with their jackets; for the last four years I’ve collected all of my chewed fingernails; I take photographs of suburban nature strip trees, which have had the tops of them cut out to accommodate electricity wires; I make videos of my son eating lunch; I take photos of some of my empty plates after I’ve finished eating.
I’ve always done these sorts of things and often they’d just be sitting somewhere in my studio. I thought of them as a way of keeping momentum going. At some point I noticed some people who came to my studio would be more interested in this stuff than whatever it was I was working on at the time and so I had a bit of a rethink. Over a long period of time these ‘other’ things have become an integral starting point to just about everything I do and at times they become the main focus of my work.
There’s probably a school of thought, which says, if you want to get noticed you should limit your options, that you have to create consistent signature style – or brand even – in one main media. I’ve always been drawn to Artists who don’t do this. Artist like Johnathon Barovsky who does just about everything or Robert Rooney who will spend a decade painting, and then go off and just take photos for a few years or become an art critic for a while.
One of the things I like about this way of working is that I feel as though I’m doing something art wise every day. One day I might spend 6 hours drawing, another I might have just chewed my nails. It’s a way of keeping me immersed in art without feeling suffocated by it.
As well as an artist you have taught art in various settings. Do you find that the experience of teaching art impacts your own practise in any way?
I’ve found teaching quite useful on a social level. It’s a nice counterpoint to the isolation of studio practice to find yourself in front of twenty or thirty people a couple of times a week, talking about art. Nowadays I teach drawing and art history. The art history subject has been quite a useful way of forcing me to keep up my art reading and keep me thinking outside my own practice.
It’s important for me not to really think of myself as a teacher or at least not to sound like a teacher when I’m teaching. I always tell my students not to think of themselves as students and not to think of me as a teacher. I think you learn more at art school if you think of everyone there as your contemporaries. The ones getting paid have more experience and you might choose to take notice of some of the things that they say but you also learn a lot of stuff from other students.
You completed studies at Monash University and followed up with Post Grad and Master studies at the Victoria College of the Arts. Looking back how do you believe those experiences have helped shape your artistic direction
My undergraduate study at Monash was a major disappointment. Most of the lecturers where very, very conservative and we were never pushed to show our work or even go to see exhibitions. By contrast, when I did my post grad and masters at the Victorian College of the Arts I was immediately struck by the diversity of work being made and the fact there was a real focus on exhibiting.
Only a few months into the course I saw first year students beginning to put their work up in the student galleries. Occasionally impromptu group shows would just appear on a spare bit of wall in the studios. That was a real revelation for me and a good kick in the pants. I realised what a great thing it is to be in an environment where everyone just assumes you’re working towards a show.
I also had a couple of really valuable lecturers there, particularly Neil Malone and Lou Hubbard. They got me to ask better questions about my work. I started to focus less on how I wanted the work to look and focus more on what I was thinking and feeling and let the work conform to that.
Many thanks to Amanda Van Gils “ace cub reporter” for doing the research, asking for the interview and grilling Vin for answers.
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Compiled and edited by Amanda Van Gils © 2009+
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