biography
For more than four decades, Victoria Ryan has explored the territory between representation and abstraction, developing a body of work distinguished by an intuitive use of color, atmosphere and light. Landscape has remained a point of departure throughout much of her career, but Ryan has rarely been interested in simply describing what she sees. Her paintings transform the observed world through color, memory and emotional experience.
Ryan studied at Art Center College of Design and Otis Art Institute before earning her BFA in Painting and Drawing from California State University, Long Beach in 1982. Her work began receiving recognition early in her career through museum, gallery and juried exhibitions. These included exhibitions at Laguna Art Museum and the Julia Morgan Memorial Exhibition of California Women Artists at Riverside Art Museum, followed by the Crocker-Kingsley Exhibition at Crocker Art Museum. Over the course of her career, Ryan has received numerous awards and honors for work spanning both abstraction and landscape.
Soft pastel became an important medium during the first decades of Ryan’s career. Her landscapes became known for their luminous color and dreamlike quality, moving fluidly between recognizable place and abstraction. Her work was widely exhibited and collected during this period, entering private and corporate collections. Paintings and pastels from these earlier decades continue to circulate on the secondary market today.
After spending most of her life in California, Ryan moved from the Northern California coast to Taos, New Mexico, in 2016. The expansive landscape, distinctive light and particular palette of the high desert initiated another period of exploration. Working in both pastel and oil, she began developing a body of work in which landscape remained a point of departure while color, gesture and abstraction assumed increasingly prominent roles.
Soon after Jones Walker of Taos opened in 2018, Ryan and the gallery began a relationship that continues today. In October 2019, Jones Walker presented her solo exhibition, Being Here: A Love Letter to Taos. Encompassing large and small oils and pastels developed during her first years in New Mexico, the exhibition marked an important evolution in her work and established her presence as a New Mexico painter.
In the years since, Ryan’s paintings have moved increasingly toward abstraction. Oil, acrylic and pastel continue as her primary media, scale has expanded, and recognizable landscape frequently gives way to gesture, texture, line and improvisation. Yet the concerns that have animated her work from the beginning remain: color and light, the natural world, human connection, and the relationship between external landscape, the internal experience and redefining reality.
Ryan’s work has been exhibited and collected since the early 1980s and is held in private and corporate collections in the United States and abroad, including Mayo Clinic and UCSD Medical Center. She lives and works in Northern New Mexico and is represented by her primary dealer, Jones Walker of Taos.