Looking at Claudia Ryan’s drawings, it doesn’t take long to realize that a storm is brewing in this artist’s inner world. The seductive lure of that storm (often a literal presence in the form of a smoky black cloud of chalk) and its chaotic depths is what sets Ryan’s drawings apart — that, and her robust use of line and color. For her saturated hues — deep plums, peaches, cherries and pitch black — she owes a debt to Karl Kelly, who makes artists’ pastels by hand in a room adjacent to Ryan’s at Lemon Studio in Tampa. For her hypnotically repetitive swirls and grids of lines, reminiscent of automatic drawing, she can thank a habit of being charmingly obsessive. The result is a body of drawings that teem with babbling excitement, as visitors to a group show at Clayton Galleries could well see.
claytongalleries.net.
This article appears in Sep 12-18, 2007.