Marketview Arts is pleased to present both recent and past work by artist and educator, Ry Fryar.

Opening reception: May 4, 6:00 PM.

“Detail” Statement

What we choose to see as detail says as much about who we are as the subject at hand. If we were bigger, or smaller, we would see different kinds of detail. It scales us, marks our relative size in the universe, and reveals what we care about most.

My interest in detail started when I was a kid, when one summer my parents put me in swimming lessons. The pool was highly chlorinated and nobody told me about goggles. My vision blurred and eyes burned for hours after.

It was the worst in bright light and it would have been easier to keep eyes shut. But the chlorine halo made the world seem so very strange, that I absolutely had to keep my eyes open whatever the cost. For a few hours, my ability to see detail broke. I remember opening my eyes as wide as I could despite the burning, amazed that I could no longer choose what to focus upon. Light, dark, color, movement, all of it fought for my attention and none of it won. My visual focus sort of spread out, become broader and less refined. I saw much more than usual, but somehow I was too small to comprehend.

This show documents my continued interest in the act of perceiving detail over the course of about 15 years. It is a selected sample of artwork I have made to expand and/or contract my ability to see. In these series, I attempt to shift my own scale though the act of perception, drawing and painting. Just a tiny scale shift, just enough to see if I can perhaps approximate the kind of detail that I might see if I were just a bit bigger or a little smaller than I actually am. This show includes three general areas where I have experimented with perception and detail in this way.

First, maps are a great device for exploring detail. They exclude nearly everything, all of the world except for a bare few remainders designated as important such as a road, boundary, or zone. A map says a lot about which details matters most for the mapmaker.

Second, detail in landscape contends directly with complexity. I cannot paint everything I see because I do not have enough time. Of necessity, landscape painting is the result of excluding practically everything except for the very few details that I designate as important. In a natural panorama, complexity is often about repetition. Hills, clouds, trees, branches, leaves, flowers and twigs all repeat. Variation in spacing, scale and overlap obscure this essential truth, but repetitive form is why real landscape overwhelms. In these works, I try to focus detail on the things not usually focused upon. Much of this series is about shifting detail towards the scrub; that endless web of twigs, branches and messy brambles normally edited out of landscape.

Third and last, I am interested in movement and its connection to detail. Our eyes jump immediately to the movement of fire, explosion, dogs running, the evidence of wind across the land or pushing through the clouds. Movement itself its own sort of detail, blurring and decreasing all the elements around it, drawing our attention to it weather we choose so or not.

-Ry Fryar

About Ry Fryar
Ry Fryar is a visual artist and the coordinator of fine art at York College of Pennsylvania. He earned his MFA from The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His artwork has been exhibited in solo and group shows across the country. Ry is one of the originating facilitators for the Marketview Arts Center, the Appell Fellowship Program and the YCASE high school art exhibition series.