Abbey Ryan is a Philadelphia based painter, designer and illustrator who studied here in Pennsylvania as well as in New York and Massachusetts. She has a portfolio site, in which she showcases her illustration and design work, as well as her gallery art.

The latter is non-figurative, with arrangements of soft edged shapes that give impressions of movement and suggestions of morphing forms. They are arranged with a designer’s eye for the importance of negative space and rendered with a muted palette and delicate applications of texture.

Given my predilection for representational work, I find more interest in her painting blog, Ryan Studio, in which she has recently taken on the “painting-a-day” discipline, and paints crisp, painterly oils of simple subjects like fruit, vegetables, candy and other immediately available subjects that are often the chosen subjects for daily painters.

Ryan posts large images of her small paintings that are actually large enough to get a good feeling for the surface of the painting and the way the paint is applied, something I wish more artists would do when presenting their work online, both for the benefit of those just looking, and for the benefit of those looking to buy, who must make a judgement about the appeal of a painting from an online image.

Ryan’s strengths show when she arranges slightly more complex compositions and tackles textured and patterned surfaces in addition to her primary subject.

Ryan appears to be fairly young, and her willingness to take on the painting-a-day regimen, and her confidence in working with more complex elements within it, make me think it will be interesting to watch the course of her development as a painter.

[Link and suggestion courtesy of Jason Waskey]

I know very little about this artist, not even whether “M Collier” is male or female. What little biographical information there is simply mentions that the artist was born in San Francisco, earned a degree in Art History from California State University, has “lived in and traveled to many places”, and now resides in Southern California.

M Collier is represented online by a painting blog called Paintings from the Point, as well as by inclusion in the DailyPainters.com site and membership in the Daily Painters Guild. I mentioned Collier briefly in my post last spring about Painting a Day Blogs (Round 6), The Daily Painters Guild. I don’t see any sign of a dedicated portfolio site or mention of gallery representation.

Collier’s paintings appear refined and accomplished, with an emphasis on chiaroscuro and the effects of light as it plays across the the gleaming faces of curved china dishes, around reflective silver surfaces, and through transparent vessels holding water, and usually, flowers.

There is a fascination with light, and the color of flowers and vegetables, but in particular I think, with the way these smooth curved objects sashay the light beams around their forms in graceful arcs and ellipses. If you look at the shapes of the areas of color, soft, muted blue-grays and delicate slivers of highlights, you’ll find those curves and arcs repeated again and again. This is particularly evident in the repeated theme of stacks of teacups, in which your eye follows a swinging line back and forth as it travels down the canvas.

Most of these works are painted in oil on board at a small scale, often 6×6″ (15x15cm), and take on the (I think) difficult challenge of handling square compositions. They are predominantly of small, intimate subjects, treated with a clear realist approach. The compositions usually employ a dark, very neutral background, against which brightest highlights in the foreground objects sometimes go to pure white. Within that range, color is carefully controlled and at times seems almost like an accent; with the red of cherries or the greens and reds of vegetables appearing almost like an extra element on top of a monochromatic final.

When viewing the works in Collier’s blog, there is no “Previous Posts” navigation, so use the dated links in the right hand column. You can also find a thumbnail-gallery display on the DailyPainters.com site that makes it easier to get an overview.