Ryan Steadman

Ryan Steadman is an independent artist, writer, and curator who lives and works in Delhi, New York. He has had solo or two-person shows at Karma in New York, NY; Halsey McKay Gallery in East Hampton, NY; Wilder Gallery in London, UK; Europa in New York, NY, and elsewhere. He has contributed to group shows at Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York, NY; Vardan Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Artemis Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, New York, NY; and others. His art has been featured in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Harper’s, The East Hampton Star, and other publications. Steadman received his BFA from the University of Georgia in Athens, GA and MFA from Pratt Institute in New York City.

In Conversation with Friday Arts

Friday Arts

Tell us about your practice broadly and your journey as a painter.

Ryan Steadman

I see my practice as ongoing experiments with paint that express the nature of being human. As a young artist, I didn’t really get excited about painting until I saw Van Gogh, where the physicality of paint added so much to the narrative. Now, I’ve incorporated painting into my life as a way to save images and memories that feel important to me.

Are there themes or subjects you find yourself returning to repeatedly?

Themes change depending on where I am in life, but I’ve always been interested in creating a world that mirrors the real one yet emphasizes my personal feelings/tastes to the viewer.

Second Cutting refers to the second harvest of a field after it has been worked, harvested, and allowed to regenerate. Does that theme of return—and looking again at familiar ground to discover something new—connect to your practice?

Absolutely. On a longer timescale, I returned to "figurative" painting in 2020 after a twelve-year absence. But even within my current practice, fulfillment often comes from editing and re-editing my paintings over months and even years. This process is a big part of each painting becoming a unique object and not something that comes out the same each time by following a recipe.

You left New York City for the rural Great Western Catskills. How has living there changed your work?

In many ways, to be honest. We went from pre-pandemic NYC to isolation in the countryside in a matter of months. That transformation showed me both how trivial art-world concerns are and how fragile and critical life truly is—it must be cherished. Soon after, I wanted to make sure my art was primarily about my life and immediate surroundings, and hopefully people can relate to that.

Animals feature often in your work and rarely feel incidental. What draws you to them as subjects and what does painting them allow you to explore?

I’ve always been interested in and have sympathized with animals since childhood but never really thought to feature them in paintings until we moved to the Catskills in 2020. Previously, animal art seemed confined to naturalist hobbies or pet portraits. But here I quickly came to see animals as an extension of the landscape, even a bridge between us and the landscape, and as something we contend with every day on multiple levels. These interactions really interested me. With humans, I feel like we’re always, especially in America, looking at (rewarding or condemning) our differences, but we take our similarities for granted. Meanwhile, animals are clearly different than us, but they often share surprising similarities that make one question the nature of consciousness.

Your family appears throughout your work. How has being a parent changed the way you observe, record, or understand the world around you?

That’s a tough question. I think parenting has highlighted how much patience I lacked and why I need to work on that. It has also shown me that objectivity is impossible, but that my personal biases can enrich my art as long as I’m aware of them.

Your compositions can feel spare and graphic, while their surfaces can feel heavily worked, almost sculpted. Can you speak about that tension?

I’ve always liked graphic American art, like Ed Ruscha and John Wesley, but felt the process was ultimately limiting. The New Image era of painters from the Seventies like Neil Jenney and Susan Rothenberg, who borrowed tenets of Minimalism to create their work, opened up more possibilities. Unlike a lot of painters, who seem to revel in the illusion of the image, I like when a picture jostles back and forth between object and image. I don’t know why, but I enjoy that tension.

You sometimes return to an older canvas over the course of many years. What causes you to revisit a painting?

I feel like I’m always learning—about color, composition, brushwork—and sometimes feel like I didn’t have the answer to a piece until sometimes a year later. Conversely, and I think you’ll hear other painters say this, the paintings that come together too quickly sometimes feel like they’re missing something . . . that struggle maybe.

Who are your creative heroes, in or out of the artworld?

I don’t believe in heroes per se, but David Byrd, a painter who settled in the Catskills after retiring, is an artist I admire, not only for making beautiful, thoughtful work, but also for overcoming so many hardships to make it, away from the spotlight of New York City. On the other end of the spectrum, I admire the artist/writer/dealer William Copley for taking on any arts role that excited him at the time, particularly back when that was less common in the art world.

What artists do you think your work is in conversation with?

That’s a hard question! I like so many artists and take different aspects from them, but I don’t feel fully aligned with many people. I like early Alex Katz. Alice Neel sometimes. Certainly Guston. That whole era of painters. I love the spirit of Bill Traylor’s work, although my work looks very different. David Byrd.

When AI comes for us, what three words will it use to describe your work?

I’m hoping it doesn’t come to that, but maybe “oddly rendered mundanities”?

What does Friday mean to you?

Friday is a day of hope—thinking that the coming two days off will excite or recharge you like never before. Although it rarely works out that way, having hope is crucial.