Rob Ryan

I saw a Rob Ryan exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. I was already familiar with his work having been introduced to it during a paper cutting workshop I took a few years ago. I found his work impressive and initially liked it visually quite a bit but I found myself loosing interest in it very quickly. This exhibition reinforced this first opinion.
At first I was pleasantly surprised looking at his exhibition, caught up in the amount of detail and all the minutiae he manages to achieve through paper cutting and how time consuming and focused the work must be, though the fact he has quite a few assistants helping with doing the actual paper cutting was constantly in my mind.
After a few minutes of looking at his exhibition however I was starting to get bored, it was all so similar, using similar patterns and techniques throughout while not branching out stylistically enough. This is good in that Ryan has an iconic look but I find his style is far too specific, though I guess this could just be a symptom of paper cutting where it appears to be harder to vary your way of doing things. I did like that things were varied a bit size wise but it wasn't really enough to keep my interest.

I do visually like his work though, I just find it too aesthetically similar for it to keep my interest on it's own. I did feel like Ryan's work would be well suited to some sort of supporting role, or something where the art isn't the only focus. It turns out this happens as Rob Ryan has a few illustrated books. I looked through one of these called The Kingdom Revealed (2014). I really enjoyed the book on a visual level and the art in it did seem to be the main focus. I think the addition of narrative helped elevate my interest in it. He did use a combination of digital and paper cutting in the book however and this shows as the illustrations have a lot more variety than the work in his exhibition.

Mainly Rob Ryan has me thinking about style in my own work. I have several ways of approaching my work so varying my work style wise isn't an issue and all these methods are aesthetically coherent so that isn't an issue either. The main thing on my mind is making sure I hit the right balance in my series of works where I use a similar style. I want the pieces in my series of works to support and elevate each other but I don't want the work to be so similar that they make each other boring like Ryan's work does to me. Due to the flexibility of the materials I use in comparison to paper cutting this shouldn't be too much of a struggle.
(http://www.tagfinearts.com/rob-ryan.html)
(http://rob-ryan.blogspot.co.uk/2013_07_01_archive.html)

I just had a revelation about my issue with Ryan's work. Aesthetically similar but unrelated work has no interest to me, but if the work is related then it then it suddenly becomes much more interesting. This simply reconfirms my artistic philosophy that work in a series is just a lot more compelling than anything stand alone.