StandardVision Artist Showcase: Muted Urban Stillness with Artist Ryan C. Brown

For the month of October, StandardVision has curated a site-specific showcase from UK-based painter Ryan C. Brown on view across a number of StandardVision’s large-scale exterior displays throughout Los Angeles through October 31st.

A painter based in Norwich, UK, Ryan C. Brown’s paintings feature weeds and flowers, show dogs, shoes, falling water, tiled walls, and bold backlit silhouettes. Often depicting moments of everyday stillness and sites of entropy in cartoonish urban spaces, he is interested in how banality and absurdity can intersect to produce imagery that explores ideas of aloneness, introspection, nostalgia and transience.

Recently, the artist’s paintings depict familiar quotidian spaces: public parks, suburban gardens, alleyways, and residential streets. Flowers and animals appear alongside brick buildings and wrought iron railings, and light suggestive of threshold moments interacts with rain, vapour, urine, smoke, and dew. Sometimes partially obscured people create momentary disruptions in these scenes of muted urban stillness.

The places in Brown’s paintings are pieced together from drawings and photographs, and also memories and impressions of spaces that the artist has encountered in the past. These composites are simplified and smoothed out to foreground the solitude of the subjects existing inside them. Instead of painting physical environments in all their specificity, Brown is interested in portraying instances of subjective “present-ness” within these environments, exploring them as sites of nostalgia, daydream, and introspection.

Catch works by Ryan C. Brown on view at 3rd Street Crossing, 888 N Vermont, Courtyard Marriott LA Live, and Kurve LA, through June 30th, and learn more about the artist on Instagram.