Ryan Jones
San Francisco, California
Ryan Jones is an American artist known for contemporary realist paintings.
MessageRyan Jones is an American artist known for contemporary realist paintings. Born in California in 1981, Ryan lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. His artistic journey began at a young age and was influenced by his study of art at Stanford University where renowned artist Enrique Chagoya provided mentorship. Primarily self taught as an oil painter, after college Jones worked as a matte painter for George Lucas on scores of Hollywood films where his eye for cinematic intrigue helped mold a distinct lens through which he viewed the world. Jones’ work now embraces and challenges the traditions of realist painting with an exploration of contemporary practices and observations. His artwork is included in a number of prestigious private collections and has been showcased in galleries, museums and art fairs around the world.
Statement
Ryan Jones’ paintings refract our modernity through lenses of the past, recontextualizing archival imagery as a means of telling new stories about the present. With references spanning film, advertising, and media across several decades, Jones’s fracturing and reassembling of the subject matter speaks both to the relentless passing of time and the perpetuation of cultural memory. The work is cinematic, mysterious, and stylistically provocative with its use of composition and the embellishment of visuals from the worlds of film and advertising. Having originally begun his career as a painter of lifelike backdrops for film sets, Jones’s talent of painting for the silver screen finds echoes in his paintings’ luminous highlights and manipulated depth, while the framing of his tableaus evokes storyboards created for screenplays or scripts. Jones’s signature use of a divided canvas allows for disparate scenes to accumulate towards a larger narrative, ultimately completed by the viewer’s own projections. What results is a colliding of past and present, charting the evolution of iconography and its many meanings within the endless expanse of history.