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Ryan Nelson
Washington, DC & Kalamazoo, Michigan
Ryan Nelson opted to leave the confines of art school academia to pursue his passion for comics in his paintings and drawings. Using a DIY (Do-It-Yourself) mentality, he appropriates the comic style by silk screening posters, fliers and album covers promoting his own band, and the bands of others. Nelson, himself a huge fan of comics, draws inspiration from one of the most cutting-edge comic artists of the twentieth century: Roy Lichtenstein. Nelson utilizes such primitive comic techniques as heavy black lines and a "two-color process" (black, a color, and the white of the paper). Many older comics were printed this way, as it was less expensive than the contemporary four-color ink printing process. (One of Nelson's contemporary influences, Jordan Crane, also uses a two-color process.) But it is the striking palette -- rather than monetary concerns -- that attracts Nelson to this more antiquated style of printing. Nelson's recent work shows a single frame painted on various sized sheets of prepared plywood. These frames each suggest a larger narrative, the resolution of which remains ambiguous. As such, Nelson's incomplete visual stories encourage the viewer to ruminate as to what the previous or next frame might be. His work features characters that resemble himself in predicaments with which might be a girlfriend. |