By ION on Apr 16, 2009 in CULTURE
[Artist] Ronan Boyle
From spending his childhood in wealthy West Vancouver to years battling addiction on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside streets, Ronan Boyle’s life has been one of duality—of seeing and existing in two very different worlds in one urban landscape. An Irish landed immigrant, Ronan moved to Canada at age three with his family. His start as an artist began after a high school career he describes as “short-lived.” (He quit during grade 10 after “experimenting a lot with drugs.”) At eighteen, after a stint in a Texas rehab centre, he was settled and making his first pieces of art. It was during this time that he met the mother of his child, spending the next seven years relatively clean and sober.
His first public art exhibitions took place during these years. His work showed in cafes and restaurants: first in 1992 at Cafe du Soleil on Commercial Drive, then at the Soho in Yaletown. By 1994 Ronan was living back on the streets and using drugs but still making art out of whatever he could find. A stack of hand-drawn, collaged postcards sent back and forth between himself and a friend in New York provides an epic documentation of these years, and provides a first glimpse at the aesthetic that he has developed and refined in his more recent work. Around 2000, he got clean, entered treatment, and once again put pen and paintbrush to paper. After considering art school, Ronan turned to the decorative arts, undergoing a period of training with master decorators. Soon after this, he participated in annual group shows at Blakes as well as solo shows at Cassis in 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2007.
After meeting Realtor Thu Watson in 2004—a woman to whom he credits much of his success, and the subject of his previous Lucky series—his next few years were spent back among the wealthy, traveling and painting commissioned decorative abstracts for showrooms and real estate. “It was such a contrast to the years before sleeping in abandoned buildings, vehicles and stairwells,” he says. The faded and discoloured concrete walls of his street environment had been replaced by the artfully distressed concrete walls of the high-end real estate market. Both manifestations have given rise to his most recent body of work, aptly titled Concrete.
Inspired by the ongoing clash between establishment and voices of dissent, this series of panels investigates the dialogue between property owner and street artist: two perspectives that collide and leave their traces in the layers of paper and paint that pervade much of our urban space. Ronan describes this body of work as “more about the whole than the parts.” His is a gestalt philosophy that maintains each component is less about its singular meaning and more about its relationship to all the others. Stencils, posters, markers and the art of the buff. Torn paper, rust marks, shapes and scribbles worn away by weather and decay and human intervention—Ronan’s Concrete series takes all of these elements out of their natural context. Hanging them in concrete-coated reclaimed wood panels on the gallery wall acts as a study in re-contextualization, helping viewers see the beauty and value in what normally goes unnoticed on the street.
The first five months of creation were spent painstakingly researching to find the mixture of materials that would best suit his needs. Ronan spent long hours studying the concrete wall on its own and experimenting with different types of paint, plaster and methods of distressing. When the time came to add imagery to a rather intimidating studio full of empty concrete panels, he steered clear of obvious political statements. “Words make things smaller,” he says. “I wanted to make more room for different interpretations of the work.” To this effect, he chose fragmented warnings from what he calls the “systems of order” layered underneath chaotic responses from those vying for what has become a highly contested venue of public expression.
After celebrating eight years clean in January, gaining representation from grace-gallery and presenting his first gallery-based solo show, Ronan says that for him, 2009 “feels like a bit of an arrival.” He has persevered through the best and the worst that his world had to offer, and has come out on top—with clear eyes, a humble heart and a sharp, creative and inquiring mind.
Words: Shallom Johnson
Photography: Kris Krug www.staticphotography.com
