Underpass

Hello, my name is Ryan Gilmartin.

The title of this painting, 'Underpass' might clarify a little about what you see but my aim is to put the viewer into a place they don't have a name for- to wrestle with the ambiguous space between familiar and unfamiliar. 

I started this painting with a kind of hurried mark-making. In other words, I tried to create with few constraints or filters while applying brush marks and lines, and I let accidents happen with drips and washes. The fluidity of paint and immediacy of drawing both lend themselves well to a process of getting many layers of visual information onto a surface.

The lines, drips, and brush marks presented opportunities for editing or embellishment and eventually, I transformed them into shapes and forms with features that I found interesting. The color and texture and shapes eventually revealed themselves as something else. 

In this case I ended with a landscape and a kind of architecture because I wanted to play with scale and create something almost recognizable as a kind of support or scaffolding for the images I had made earlier. The juxtaposition of these biomorphic forms on a large, block-like structure in front of a bright blue sky seemed to be an odd pairing and lands right where I like my imagery to be a representative but still abstract space, between knowing and not knowing what I'm looking at. A place that leaves me a little perplexed by what I see and reminds me, and hopefully the viewer, that despite having some familiarity with a place or an object, how we interpret it is often an abstraction, nonetheless.