Grace Painting

Annie Ryan is an Artist and Illustrator. Image manipulation, disproportion and texture have been the signature of much of her work. Familiarity with the world around us often dulls our perception: sometimes to the extent we don’t really ‘see' a great deal of what we are looking at. By distorting and manipulating form, colour and texture in unfamiliar ways she emphasises or diminishes elements of the subject. Natural proportion is hard-wired into humans, by challenging it Annie looks to find ways to represent and see her subject matter afresh. It’s fascinating to her how the anatomy of the human form in particular lends itself so well to exaggeration and modification. She constantly gathers images; from 1940’s mugshots to film stills as well as photographs taken in everyday life. These form the library and her ‘toolkit’ from which she can begin the manipulation process. She often takes these pieces into acrylic paint creating shading and shapes using hand-painted dots and marks.