Kathryn Ryan has been short-listed for several major art awards including the Wynne Prize in 2000, 2004 and 2007; the Alice Prize in 1998, 1999 and 2001, and the Hutchins Art Prize in 1998, 1999 and 2001. In 1998 Ryan was awarded the Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award and in 1990 the BP Acquisitive Prize. Ryan's works have been purchased by the curators and advisers for the Macquarie Group Collection, the Warrnambool Art Gallery Collection and Artbank. Most recently her work has been acquired by the Parliament House Collection.

Kathryn Ryan's painterly interpretations of nature move beyond the merely representational. Driven by a desire to express something of the deeper, intimate experience that the landscape can offer, Ryan uses horizon lines, paddocks and the trees within them as her enduring muse.

The artist states, 'There has been a shift in my work.... from the wintry landscapes of rural South West Victoria, to Glen Coe in the Scottish Highlands. In between all this was the desert of the United Arab Emirates.....
 
My views to the landscape were different in the past two years. My eyes were taken from the wintry paddocks of the Western District to the deserts of the UAE, and the high rises of a different culture in Abu Dhabi, an island city built up from the desert sands. This vastly different landscape, both desert and urban was an extreme contrast to what I was used to.  
 
It is from this background, that I then travelled again to Scotland, to the beloved highlands. Coming directly from Abu Dhabi's extreme heat, it was more than a breath of fresh air! To see the Scottish Highlands covered in thick snow was breathtaking.  
I think the Glen Coe area would probably be majestic to anyone at anytime, however perhaps my experience was heightened coming from living in the desert.
 
This landscape before me was purely majestic. Vast, beautiful, serene (despite its history), expansive, quiet and still, a place of solitude and vast space, and the light! Snow on every surface, reflecting light in every direction, from crisp blue skies to hazy low cloud cover. The majestic mountains soaring up in this vast snow covered landscape. It captured me, inspired me, still has a hold of me....
 
Winter must capture me, or is it the light and atmospheric conditions?  The quality of subdued winter light, the atmosphere and space have always drawn me in. '
 
Kathryn Ryan 2010

This awareness can be keenly observed in the many layers of paint & glaze meticulously developed within her canvases. Deep and glassy, her works invite us to gaze 'into' their surfaces, to experience something of the atmosphere which she wishes to express. The stillness of these scenes is arresting. We are drawn into an evocative world of misty serenity. Ryan says, 'Observations of nature's cycles and contrasts - growth, decay, renewal, changing light, the ambiguity and mystery offered by changing light - are translated through my painting process, to elevate the mind beyond the surface and everyday.'

Her vast expanses of space render a moment beyond the factual and offer up instead a timeless, enduring milieu of the sublime. One recognises certain universal truths in all of her landscapes, an essence that the painter has seized ingeniously, to alert us to a possible, empathetic relationship with life based on a synthesis with nature's uplifting vision.