Kathryn Ryan’s fourth exhibition with Flinders Lane Gallery, The Pines, further explores the tranquillity and beauty of Victoria’s South West. Ryan’s meditative oil paintings have earned the artist critical attention since she started exhibiting in 1986.

Inspired by a direct relationship with Victoria’s Western District, artist Kathryn Ryan’s landscapes intentionally call to mind a sense of contemplation. Informed by the artist’s desire to capture the duality of the sublime or spiritual moment, the cragged pines of the western district region serve as Ryan’s central characters.

Ryan comments that “the silhouette pines are intimate portraits. I am drawn to the beauty, the delicate, fragile and sensitive qualities of the battered and ageing cypress pines, contrasted with the serene and evocative space of the landscape”.

A combined quality of solidity and fragility permeate as these noble subjects stand majestically, eternally in a predawn light. As though peering through rising mist, Ryan’s paintings oscillate between soft suggestion and photo-realist clarity. Perceptions of distance and light contort as space is reduced to a minimalist, atmospheric moment.

Of primary concern to Ryan is to “find a balance and harmony of opposites, of strength and fragility, both within ourselves, and nature. I have used the landscape, and particularly trees as metaphors to explore this.”

Ryan’s ability to render an ambience of silence is supported by an intentionally subdued palette and delicate, lace like brush work. In recent years Ryan has been shortlisted for several major art awards including the Wynne Prize 2000, 2004 & 2007; the Alice Prize 1998, 1999, 2001, and the Hutchins Art Prize 1998, 1999, 2001.

In 1998 Ryan was awarded the Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award and in 1990 the BP Acquisitive Prize.
Ryan’s last three exhibitions at Flinders Lane Gallery have completely sold out, works being purchased by the curators and advisers for the Macquarie Bank Collection, the Warrnambool Art Gallery Collection and Artbank.