MALCOLM RYAN paintings
RECENT AND RENEWED PAINTINGS
An online exhibition from 1st February to 30th April 2025
I thought I’d show some recent paintings and altered older paintings, and to make a few comments about each. Their origins and why I thought each subject worthwhile, with perhaps a little about my decisions and at times difficulties, in completing each to my satisfaction. For the older paintings now changed I have included a before and after photo of each painting. Some of the paintings will have been seen by some of you before.
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THE DEVOTED MOTHER 46”x 30” high (117 x 76 cm), painted in the final years of living in Norfolk before we left there in late 1998 to live in West Wales. It was inspired by seeing my daughter Anne with Alice her second child resting together on a hot day, while staying with us. I never liked the background room setting. For some unknown reason I had put them in the living room of our former home in Suffolk, which was not appropriate, either in its perspective, and oddly in having a bedside lamp. I removed all of that background by scraping it off, and putting in a new undercoating. The intention was to create a more intimate setting, appropriate to the two figures. The bed was changed and the child given a nightdress. Last was the scene outside the window; to get the lighting right, and find a suitable place setting. Appropriately I thought why not our old house in Norfolk? as if it was seen across the garden from a fictitious home. I completed the painting in late 2025.
HEREFORD CATHEDRAL IN DECEMBER DUSK 32”x 32” (81 x81 cm). Painted in 2002, as part of my series of English cathedrals, each shown in different weather conditions. On a long cross country car journey we visited the cathedral just before Christmas; the city then had an air of festivity and bustle. I tried to record a little of that. Years later however seeing the painting again, I did not like the male figure in the foreground, too cluttered, so he was removed in 2025 and the picture re- varnished.
THE PAST IN THE PRESENT 40”x 24” high (102 x 61 cm). Painted on board. A fine smooth surface was needed for such detailed work. The painting was begun in 2016, after a visit with friends to the Museum of Classical Archaeology in Cambridge, which houses a collection of full size replicas of sculpture from ancient Greece and Rome. My favourite piece was this, known as the Ludovsi Throne, said to represent the birth of the goddess Venus emerging from the sea helped by her maidens, created about 460 BC. The original lost, and rediscovered in the former garden of Julius Caesar in Rome in the 1880s
In 2016 I painted in all of the background and the figures including the child. Beginning on the detailed relief sculpture I soon found my planned method of painting it with oil painting crayons was hopelessly inadequate. I abandoned it. In 2025 I found it in my store room, and thought to try again. Trying first one small area; such detail was very time consuming and tiresome to do, but workable. The result was that while working on other paintings each day, I would spend just an hour or two on the detail, rather like knitting, I gradually crept across the painting day after day throughout the summer of 2025. Finally when all was dry came the bands of sunlight; rather a risky exercise, but accomplished without any disasters.
A LETTER FROM A DISTANT FRIEND 38”x 22”high ( 96 x 56cm) Begun in 2023 then put aside to be completed this year 2026. I had found the full size drawing and reference for this which was done in the 1990s and features a room in our Norfolk home. Having spent a lot of time on it then I thought to take it up. It seemed simple enough, but never went well. I changed the lighting on the walls several times, put in the cat before I felt better about it.
IN CITY SUNLIGHT 32”x24”high (81 x 61 cm) A new painting from 2025 featuring my grandson Jacob Thomas in a sunlit room based in the National Gallery in London, but with some alterations, and a rather different outside scene, as if we are on a higher street level elsewhere in the city.
THE BROKEN VASE 38”x 22” high ( 96 x 56 cm) A new painting from 2026, which has been waiting for me to take up for a decade or more.
IN THE PANDEMIC 32” x 18”high (81 x 45.7 cm) A new painting planned and conceived in 2021 during the pandemic; painted in 2025. I wonder myself why I painted this, who will ever want it, or be reminded of it? But for some reason I embarked on it, partly because my desire is to record everything in life that I experience, an impossibility I know. Somehow I am driven. I wanted to convey the strange emptiness of our city streets felt by us all at that time. I thought of it all then when out with my daughter Jane as she emerged wearing a face mask. I included the cat, why? Intuition makes many of my decisions. You can make your own conclusions.
A SUFFOLK SUNRISE 30”x 24”high (76 x 61 cm) painted in 2019. What should have been a rather straightforward exercise became a labour over which I have fiddled about on for years since. The reason was that I never got the “atmosphere” of this picture right from the outset, and came back to it time and time again, determined to get it how it should be. One reason probably, was during that time my wife Maureen who features in the foreground of the painting died. I tried to capture something beyond her likeness. The painting became important for that reason, whereas I would have settled for just a decent face. The painting joined other later paintings designed to record her. Not to achieve just her likeness, but her spirit as it was. Is that possible I still do not know. The more I look the more she becomes an enigma.
THE AVENUE 40”x 32”high (102 x 81cm) Painted in 2025, this scene is of the early 1970s. My wife Maureen and I, had with our two small children, decided rather rashly to leave London in 1968, to live in West Suffolk. There to convert a derelict corn mill into our new house, and by that, avoid having a mortgage to service. All was an attempt for a new life; for me to support my family on the sale of my paintings. It was hope and optimism over adversity. I lasted for two years.
Not to return to London; but to take a temporary job in Cambridge, an hour or so bus journey to work each day at Cambridge Scientific Instruments, makers of electron microscopes. I worked there for about 15 months in the publications department. Each morning I walked from the bus station across Jesus Green through the avenue of plane trees as each season passed.
Insignificant small incidents in life, recur in our memories, and this painting is for me a kind of celebration of one such, which I wanted to try to record. It was part of the joy and belief I then held for our future. What happened? Well, unexpectedly one day Maureen and our two little girls Jane and Anne arrived at my workplace. My colleagues called me, and there they stood. Maureen always at ease with people was already engaged with them, the children were admired. Our Manager David appeared, and all was such a delightful interlude. Shortly afterwards they left. But I basked with pride that all now knew my family.
Why should that brief meeting stay lodged in my memory? Thinking about it, I felt moved to try to record it, and with difficulty planned and assembled as much reference material as I could muster. And although it all took several months to complete, it was as though I had a guiding hand to help me, making the right decisions at each stage, and as in painting, being aware to take advantage when accidental effects occur, and to bring them into the painting My painting is how I imagine them all, walking back through the avenue into the city centre. My telling all of this, will I hope add to your pleasure in looking at the painting.
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THE DOUBLE RAINBOW 32”x 20”high (81 x 51 cm) My latest painting, which most likely will still need more work. It was inspired by a train journey in 2022, when on holiday with our daughter Jane and husband Paul we visited Norwich one day. Returning, the train ran into a rain storm. They sat opposite busy on their mobile phones as we progressed, out of which a fine double rainbow appeared, which they were unaware of. I made a drawing and took some photos from which very recently I took the subject up as a painting. My thoughts were that the scene witnessed was a common place of this time; to be on a public train or bus, and find that everybody else was absorbed elsewhere; on their phones or computers, not in their surroundings, which in my painting was to witness the beautiful rainbow. That became a metaphor to me of this strange time that I as an old man I find myself in.
ABANDONED AIRFILD IN SUFFOLK 18”x 12” high (45.5 x 30.5 cm) Painted in 2025 as a little light relief from complex time consuming larger paintings. In a sense with this it was returning to an old subject from the early 1970s. This from memory, of travelling all over East Anglia then, and being aware of so many abandoned such places left over from WW2. It became a subject. Nature reclaiming its own. Romantic if such was known about each place and its brief history and events. To the modern day painter a substitute for the ruined abbeys loved by the painters of the early 19th century.
WHERE MOTORWAYS JOIN 18”x 12”high ( 45.5 x 30.5cm) 2025. Again something modest in size and a pleasure to do, making a subject not considered, yet unique to the time. Will it all last this ever growing world of the private car? Being 88 years old this year, I can remember whole London streets devoid of cars where children played all day in the 1940s. However I think this a worthwhile subject; and can predict if my little picture survives it will one day be looked on with nostalgia.
UNDER AND OVER MOTORWAYS 18”x 12”high ( 45.5 x 30.5 cm) 2025. This is another small motorway picture, companion to the previous picture. Sitting in the back of a car, passenger on a long journey across Britain on speeding motorways, notebook in hand, ever looking at the passing scene. Another time, another place, I leave you with this, destination nears.
BEYOND THE BREAKWATER 24”x 18”high ( 61 x 46 cm) 2025. Finally, we have this last painting, completed in 2025. Another completely different subject from those already shown. Yet all of these paintings will belong to a growing series of each of these subjects. I move from one to another as each becomes a project taken up, as I think they are worth doing. Over the long years since the early 1970s, that is how I work. Inspired mainly by what I see and think worth recording as something of this time. This particular picture belongs to my Ynyslas series. The seaside village in West Wales where I live. It joins many others. I hope you enjoy the variety.