Artist Statement
2018 Solo Exhibition Ry Fryar: DETAIL

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.

I took summer swimming lessons when I was young. The pool was chlorinated and nobody told me about goggles. My vision blurred for hours after.

Bright light was the worst; it would have been easier to keep my eyes shut. The chlorine halo made the world strange, but I kept my eyes open all the same. For a few hours, my ability to see detail broke. I opened my eyes wide, amazed at my loss of control and the blur. 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 as though I had become huge somehow, but I could not comprehend.

DETAIL documents my continued interest in the act of perception. It is a selected sample of artwork I have made to expand and/or contract my ability to see. In this series, I attempt to shift my own scale though the act of perception, drawing and painting. A small scale shift, enough to see if I can perhaps approximate the kind of detail that I might see if I were a bit bigger or smaller than I am. This show includes three general areas where I have explored perception and detail.

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