Before taking up painting full-time Fergus Andrew Ryan was an Aer Lingus pilot on long-haul routes (707s/747s) including North America, the Caribbean, West Africa, the Middle East and Europe, from 1966 until 1994. This afforded not only opportunity for drawing, but access to a wide range of art institutions, museums and art literature resources, as well as opportunity to participate in art programmes overseas.
After early retirement Fergus Ryan graduated from Trinity College Dublin in theology and biblical studies, which added to an appreciation of the development of art, philosophy, and the ideas that contributed to the development of Western civilisation. Fergus Ryan's principal influences have included 19C landscape British and French painters, and, especially, the 20C American realist painter Andrew Wyeth. The artist spent the summer of 2013 in a masterclass in Italy with the noted Israeli painter Israel Hershberg, following the Italian footsteps of Corot and the Grand Tourists, and has studied for shorter periods with numerous well-known American painters, including the portrait painter David Kassan, the egg tempera master Koo Schadler, and the luminist painter Joseph McGurl. Upcoming plans include springtime study at the Florence Academy of Art in 2015.
Fergus Ryan's work has been exhibited in the Royal Hibernian Academy's annual exhibition since 2008, and at Greenacres Gallery in Wexford. His painting 'Lightkkeeper' was acquired at the RHA by the Government of Ireland and is in the State's collection at Aras an Uachtarain (the Presidential residence). His work now includes both landscape and figure in oils and in the revived medieval medium of egg tempera.
The artist lives in north County Dublin and is married to Sarah, and has four adult daughters.
Selected Group Exhibitions
2008 Royal Hibernian Academy 178th Annual Exhibition
Dublin Art Society Annual Exhibition (invited artist)
2009 The Trinity Exhibition, Oisín Gallery, Dublin (artworks by TCD staff & students)
2010 Royal Hibernian Academy 180th Annual Exhibition
2011 Royal Hibernian Academy 181st Annual Exhibition
2012 Royal Hibernian Academy 182nd Annual Exhibition
LB Fine Arts ‘Selected Collection’, Leighlinbridge, Co. Carlow (August)
LB Fine Arts, exhibition, Leighlinbridge, Co. Carlow (Nov-Dec )
Art Source Fair, LB Fine Arts, RDS Dublin (Nov)
2013 Royal Hibernian Academy 183rd Annual Exhibition
2014 Royal Hibernian Academy 184th Annual Exhibition ?
Greenacres Gallery, Wexford Festival exhibition
2015 Royal Hibernian Academy 185th Annual Exhibition
Royal Ulster Academy of Arts, 134th Annual Exhibition, Ulster Museum, Belfast
Greenacres Gallery, Wexford Festival exhibition (Oct-Nov)
2016 Royal Hibernian Academy 186th Annual Exhibition
Greenacres Gallery, Wexford Festival Opera exhibition (Oct-Nov)
National Gallery of Ireland, Hennessy Portrait Prize Shortlisted Artists Exhibition, November 2016 - March 2017
Gormleys Fine Art Christmas Exhibition
2017 Royal Hibernian Academy 187th Annual Exhibition
Family, Friends & Lovers: a Celebration of Contemporary Irish Portraiture, curated by Mick O'Dea PRHA, Ranelagh Arts Centre
2018 Royal Hibernian Academy 188th Annual Exhibition
2019 Figurative Group show, Sol Art
2021 Art Source, Sol Art | RHA Annual Exhibition
2022 RHA Annual Summer Exhibition
Articles and images in publications
International Artist Magazine, Issue 65, Feb/Mar 2009, landscape competition (finalist, full-page entry 'Sudden Breeze')
International Artist Magazine, Issue 85, Jun/July 2012, ‘The Presence of Absence’, 8-page article on my landscape paintings
Burren Insight journal, 2012 (Meeting Point)
Burren Insight journal, 2013 (Terminus)
Etruria: storie e segreti (Etruria: stories & secrets), M J Cryan: book cover features painting 'First Light, Monte Sorrate'
VOX Magazine, Jan/Mar 2015, ‘An Italian Journey: painting in the footsteps of the masters’, three-page article, and front cover image ‘Reflection’
Royal Ulster Academy 134th Annual Exhibition Catalogue, full-page image 'Islanders'
National Gallery of Ireland, 2016 Hennessy Portrait Prize exhibition ('Harold')
Sunday Business Post, 2 October 2016, Article on shortlisted artists for 2016 Hennessy Portrait Prize
From The Sunday Times review of the 2015 RHA Annual Exhibition:
"There are works that stand out as you walk past for reasons of mood, style, colour
or a trigger of recognition from elsewhere: Fergus Andrew Ryan’s Hot and Cold,
an Andrew Wyeth-esque, Martin Gale-style painting of old baths in a field with
a high horizon, trees and barn..."
From The Sunday Times review of the 2016 RHA Annual Exhibition:
"There are some stunning painted portraits this year... Entwined by Fergus Andrew Ryan."
As a realist painter I face a certain difficulty: the all-too-obvious tangible presence of the subject. Beyond sight or touch another reality is mediated by the slightest gesture or effect, a trace, the shadows of private thought, or a left-behindness suggesting some absence.
The inspiration may be, at its birth, a mere 'whim' or wisp, a wistfulness or yearning, a sense of incompleteness. Yet the place at which artist and viewer first converse is the tactile and beautiful reality of the visible subject itself. Its phenomena are often minutely explored in my work in anticipation of a glimpse of what endures forever.