Artist's Statement

The first time I saw Andrew Wyeth's egg tempera Christina's World in New York I was captured by an arresting emotion for which I then had no words. It was, I believe, wistfulness, a moment of melancholic recognition of the universal human narrative, a trace of the shadows of private thought, or a left-behindness suggesting some absence, some myth revealing a partly-seen truth as in a dusty mirror. In my own work in egg tempera and in oils the inspiration may be, at its birth, a mere 'whim' or wisp, a yearning, a sense of incompleteness, yet a glimpse of what endures forever.

.Fergus Andrew Ryan is a realist painter born in Dublin in 1948. His finely-detailed paintings have been exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy and the Royal Ulster Academy of Arts, included in the Government of Ireland’s State collection, and featured in International Artist magazine. His portrait Harold was exhibited in the National Gallery of Ireland in the Hennessy Portrait Prize 2016. He was awarded the RHA Senior Artist Prize in 2020, and was a finalist in the 2022 International Salon of the (American) Art Renewal Centre. Influenced by the thoughtful works of Andrew Wyeth and contemporary realists, and more recently by the Norwegian painter Odd Nerdrum, the artist has studied with Israel Hershberg in northern Lazio, and spent the spring of 2015 at the Florence Academy of Art. Fergus was formerly an Aer Lingus pilot on long-haul 707 and 747 operations in North America, the Caribbean, Africa and the Middle East. He holds a first class honors degree and MA in theology and biblical studies from Trinity College Dublin. He is married to Sarah.