Ryan Foster explores the friction between where representational rendering meets conceptual instability. To that end he begins with a single line, like a child does when first learning to draw, to separate the earth from the sky. This dividing line acts as a starting point for each work.
Creating a horizon line also generates two paintings – the earth below and everything else. While the "earth" of his canvases obeys normal landscape rules, the "sky" functions as a backdrop, or an alternate dimension. Here, the artist treats the pictorial space like a physical manifestation of a different realm allowing abstraction, portraiture, and still life to collide and coalesce. Often the genres bleed together becoming a landscape-portrait, or a still-life-abstract. These "blended genres" reflect our information age, as they endeavor to incorporate a wide array of content: broken abstracts, warped patterns, awkward interactions, beauty, failure, and glory.
Like quickly scrolling through media on a screen, there is an embrace of excessive stimuli as categories and subject matter clash. Ideas are explored spontaneously and easily integrated into the “feed” of content. A variety of concepts are painted and then allowed to incubate. After some time, the paintings are reworked with motifs of age and dereliction. Kudzu, creeping fig, rubble, and gravity are added to complicate the original more accessible idea. The imagery is partially subverted and the canvases become a record of abandoned concepts left to time and the elements. A sense of time-gone-by is added into the paintings and implies that nothing lasts for long.
