Ryan Molenkamp's first set of oil was a Bob Ross Master set. Ryan cannot say how much working with those paints influenced his artistic direction, but his strong interest in landscape form just might have something to do with those "happy little trees". Really, he might even describe his work as Rossian, but with a graphic, apocalyptic, architectural, Pacific Northwest twist. Ryan received a BFA from WWU in 2001 and has had participated in several group and solo shows in Seattle, Bellingham, Tacoma, and Madison, WI. He also writes a column for CityArts Magazine (Seattle edition), curates Fat Tiger Gallery, and works at the Frye Art Museum.
Ryan Molenkamp's work is about place: the place he grew up and how it is changing.
The more the natural landscape of the Pacific Northwest disappears, the more Molenkamp finds himself incorporating it into his paintings. Working from drawings in his sketchbooks, Molenkamp creates imagined landscapes that are informed by his native environment but are abstractions of it's architecture.
In his series, "The San Juans", Molenkamp combines the organic contours of the islands' landscape with his own explorations of time and space. The resulting images are of land that has been parceled into squares and rectangles. In other spaces they are references to the visual fragmentation and allocation that construction cranes, condo development, and real estate speculation has brought to the Pacific Northwest.
