Pictures : August 2021

TED RYAN: Me and my art

Art has always been a big part of my life, and I have drawn and painted for as long as I can remember, but I have never earned a living from producing or making art.

I qualified with a degree in Art and Design, undertaking supplementary and post graduate qualifications in design and community learning my initial employment was in education, youth and community work, and later community development and regeneration.

I had a number of exhibitions in the late 70s and into the 80s but my substantive income was not from art.

Being engaged to develop and manage public projects, supporting community led programmes and project, managing community learning programmes, Saturday and holiday learning opportunities for primary aged children, ensured that I reduced by ‘formal’ involvement in art activity.

Some of my community engagement ensured I remained involved with other arts activity. I have worked on stage design and production management on a feature film and a community festival, and on community arts production within local and city-wide communities.

While my substantive, paid work took up significant time, my art was always lurking in the background. I used art whenever I could in community events, and continued to draw, paint and build sculptures whenever the opportunity rose. Time was the enemy - time spent on earning a living or time spent on art - art always suffered, and over a period of 30 years I have been restricted to small sketches, hardly completing a final piece, while starting lots of them.

Here therefore is a selection of drawings form the distant past, 1970s to some recent experiments with colouring felt pens.