Mark Ryden is a contemporary American artist born in 1963.
He is one of the most well known artist of lowbrow art movement. As a child,
Ryden often drew people with “a third eye”, which annoyed and scared his
teachers. His early career started as a commercial artist creating album and
book covers. From 1998, Ryden started to make solo exhibitions including The
Meat Show, The Tree Show, The Snow Yak Show, The Gay 90’s, and etc. Most of his
artworks are paintings and sometimes sculptures and installations. His
paintings are usually very delicate with the mysterious combination of sense of
softness and eeriness. His work often features puberty girls, which refers to
Ryden’s anima. Besides, he usually fills the paintings with meaning and occult
symbols in a very detailed way, which fascinates me a lot because everytime I
look at his work, I find something new.
The Apology
This painting is from Ryden’s exhibition The Tree Show. Ryden
gained his inspiration about trees from the story of Apollo and Daphne. For
him, trees echo life and reality and trees are life and reality---they “work in
mysterious ways”. In this painting, the girl faces an upturned stump with one
open eye in its center, as if she is talking to the stump. That eye in the
center is so accentuated that I have to view the stump as a life. Furthermore,
the painting is surrounded by branches and roots of trees in the frame, making
these seems to come from the nature and goes into the nature.
Cernunnos
This installation is also from The Tree Show. According to
Ryden, this artwork is inspired by both Cernunnos in mythology, “a Celtic god
associated with animals and the hunt”, and Daphne (“Even now Phoebus embraced
the lovely tree/Whose heart he felt still beating in its inside”---from
Metamorphoses). As always, the work is full of delicate details and
meanings---the baby and the eye in the trunk represents the spirituality of the
tree itself, while at the same time, the embroidery on the baby’s cloth
represent nature---creating a interaction of nature and spirit.
The Parlor
This painting from The Gay 90’s is extremely detailed and
well-planned. Almost every element in this painting is explained in the study
drawing. The parlor holds everything together, from birth to death, from the
physical world to the spirit, creating a sense of integrity. The women on both
sides are holding eyes, mouths, ears, and etc. ---the sensors of perception,
and they are staring at the baby and the compass in the middle, as if they are
contemplating about the nature of life and world. In this painting, the dominant
rule of everything seems to be eternity---the notions of endless cycle appear
repeatedly in many parts of the painting: the baby and the skeleton, the
carving on the drawers, the divine female on the stage, the four objects one
the ground, and the eye in the very center beholding all the things.
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