Rob Ryan’s art—delicate, colorful, playful, and evocative—brings sophisticated layers of emotion to simple vignettes with universal appeal.
In this, the first book of his collected artwork, Rob Ryan combines a childlike enthusiasm for color and craft with a romantic’s compulsion to explore love, desire, fantasy, and melancholy. Working principally in papercuts and stencils, and often mixing startling artistry with a raconteur’s turn of phrase, he is able to craft an entire world within his artwork—from the slender and telling movement of characters in his narratives to the gentle complexity of fantastical flora and fauna in his irreverent silhouettes. Each work—whether it’s a stand-alone screen print, a single papercut from one of his intoxicating children’s stories, or design objects from egg cups to Victorian–style porcelain dog figurines—is a fairy tale in itself.
Bright and engaging, and edited in close collaboration with the artist, this beautiful monograph brings together work from every facet of Ryan’s career to date, and—through an accompanying text written specially for the book—explores the themes, styles, palettes, and preoccupations present throughout. Playing on familiar oppositions of isolation and creativity, alienation and warmth, even innocence and experience, Ryan’s work strikes the perfect balance between humor and vulnerability, wit and wisdom.
Rob Ryan is a star of the London arts and crafts scene whose work has succeeded thus far both as fine artwork and as commercial art, design and decoration. His work is irresistibly bright and colorful, and will find universal appeal as a gift book. He will also find an audience in art and design categories, where his artwork is appreciated alongside illustrators like Jean-Philippe Delhomme or Jean Julien, and his commercial work is aligned with such colorful names as Paul Smith, Lulu Guinness, and Liberty of London.
The first monograph celebrating the jubilant and romantic artwork of the beloved East London paper-cut artist Rob Ryan.
