Ryan Barnes
Washington
Ryan Barnes is a visual artist who specializes in painting, illustrations, and graphic art.
Message
Ryan Barnes is a visual artist who specializes in painting, drawing, illustrations, and graphic arts with an eclectic educational background in the arts and communication. He has an Associates in Visual Arts (Skagit Valley College, 2025), a Diploma in Public Affairs (DINFOS, 2019), a Certificate in Electronic Journalism (DINFOS, 2019), a Bachelor’s in Digital Cinematography (Full Sail University, 2018), and an Associates in Multimedia & Interactive Technology.
Barnes seeks to connect with his audience through visual arts and storytelling. He takes inspiration from his own life experiences, his culture, and stories both in the real world as well as myths and legends. His technique is a collage of elements from animation, comics, and the pop art movement. Often you will see a stylistic theme of making digital artwork look like it was made traditionally and traditional are look like they are flat or printed.
While art and creativity played significant roles throughout Barnes’ life, non was more significant when during a dark period of his career enlisted in the US Army, he dived back into making art every weekend while stationed in Grafenwöhr, Germany. Sitting alone in his barracks with a bottle of wine and large pepperoni pizza, Barnes would sketch, draw, and paint while watching “Let’s Draw” videos and streaming movies. One day, he saw a call to artist flyer from the Morale Welfare and Recreation to have their work exhibited at the local Annamarie & Annafest in 2019. He submitted some of the paintings he made and saw them on display in public. This was a significant push that he needed to take his art more seriously and turn it into a career. Every day since then, Barnes has been taking his art and career to the next stage after stage after stage.
Barnes has had his work exhibited at the aforementioned fair, a juried art show at Skagit Valley College, and on a Veteran’s Day board at Skagit Valley College featuring the photographs he took when he as an Active Duty Soldier. Barnes’s piece Flowers in a Coke Glass had won first place at the juried art show at Skagit Valley College and has earned a Joint Service Achievement Medal for his hard work as a photographer and videographer for the US Army.
Statement
I am a visual artist who specializes in painting, illustrations, and graphic art. Creativity has always played a crucial role in my life from making a toy laptop out of Legos as a kid, making comics in high school, to more recent fine art and illustration works. What inspires me most is solving creative problems, testing materials to find their properties, as well as my personal journey, the media I consume, my academic background, and the world around me.
While theme may vary from piece to piece or series to series, my art is largely about self expression, sharing my findings from experimenting with materials, and sharing experiences and things I find fascinating. I accomplish this using a variety of different mediums depending on the piece and intention of the work. I primarily work in graphite, charcoal, ink, acrylic/watercolor paint, digitally, or some combination thereof.
I make my art not only to share my experiences and express myself but to connect with others in a way that only human-made art really can do. I create my works in the hopes of inspiring or educating others, to give them space to take pause and feel. While I do create my works with intention and purpose, other’s may get something else out of it than I do and that’s a valid and beautiful thing.
My goals with my art overall is to connect, inspire, and add beauty to the world. I want to share the results of my experiments with materials and inspire others to play.