Nicole Renee Ryan

I use the landscape as a form of escapism.

Escapism is common in fiction, but less so in visual art. I want to create worlds that feel like stories I read as a child, places where everything is possible, where things that seemed static suddenly move and become alive (like rocks or trees moving around like clouds).

Why landscapes? I don’t come from a traditional landscape painting background; I don’t use photographs or work from references. I am world building, creating something that doesn’t exist and playing with contradictory terms. It’s that purgatory between the real and the unreal. The land and the air. Between knowing and not knowing. It’s about discovering a line between imagination and memory and losing myself in that space.

I am currently taking my paintings and turning them into installations, to create a movable changeable landscape, where the viewers can “step in” and create their own place by moving parts of the landscape around the canvas by way of magnetic shapes. My paintings of imagined spaces become magical places to wander through and explore, so that the world is a bit more beautiful and surprising.

Artistic Process
I work on multiple paintings of imagined landscapes in multiple series at the same t...

Nicole Renee Ryan is a watercolorist, oil painter and muralist from Mercer, PA. Nicole paints imagined landscapes, but surprisingly, she’s not all that interested in traditional landscape paintings, instead she uses the landscape as a means to explore the concept of memory. Her interest in the importance and fallibility of memory arose during college while getting her degree in psychology from Washington & Jefferson College.
Her goal is to recreate a place she felt she had been at but can’t quite pinpoint. As memories move from reality to abstraction, it becomes easier to misremember things, or think they may have just been a dream. This hazy area is Nicole’s source of inspiration. She uses color and shape to create ethereal landscapes that illustrate the purgatory between memory and imagination, the real and the unreal. In 2015 Nicole was awarded a residency at the New York Student’s League at Vytacil and a fellowship at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She was nominated for Pittsburgh Emerging Artist of the Year for 2016. In 2017 she was awarded a Flight School Fellowship through the Heinz Endowments.

She has exhibited paintings in the Heinz History Center and The Butler Museum of American Art. Her works have been exhi...

SOLO AND TWO PERSON EXHIBITIONS
2023 You Are In Your Own Time Now – Scheduled for July 2023 at Hoyt Art Center, New Castle, PA
2022 As Everywhere of Silver - at Southern Allegheny Museum of Art 2021 Experiments in Reality – Solo Show Boxheart Gallery, Pittsburgh, PA
Call and Response - 2 person show with Annie Heisey Union Hall, Pittsburgh, PA
2020 Land of Little Thoughts and No Worries Westmoreland Museum of Art, Greensburg, PA
Where Do We Go From Here – 2 person show with Teresa Roche Art & Light Gallery,
Greenville, SC
2018 Anywhere and Nowhere Boxheart Gallery, Pittsburgh, PA
Memories of Memories Pew Fine Arts Center, Grove City College, Grove City, PA 2017 Remnants Pop up exhibit 5852 Baum Blvd, Pittsburgh, PA
In Conversation –Associated Artists of Pittsburgh two person show at Point State Park University, Pittsburgh, PA – curator Njaimeh Njie
I Was There Nutting Gallery Wheeling, WV
The Place and the Unplace Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Pittsburgh, PA
2016 Everywhere and Nowhere Crary Art Gallery, Warren, PA Memories of Memories Undercroft Gallery, Pittsburgh, PA
Spaces Between 4049 Penn Ave, Pittsburgh, PA
2014 Weather and Mood Sans MOCA Gallery Greenville, PA
Déjà vu Grove City Artworks Grove City, PA
201...