Fergus A Ryan
Fergus Andrew Ryan is a figurative painter born in Dublin in 1948. His finely-detailed paintings have been exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy and the Royal Ulster Academy of Arts, included in the Government of Ireland's State collection, and featured in International Artist magazine.
His egg tempera portrait Harold was exhibited in the National Gallery of Ireland in the Hennessy Portrait Prize 2016 shortlist exhibition. Influenced by the thoughtful works of Andrew Wyeth and contemporary realists, the artist has studied with Israel Hershberg in northern Lazio, and spent the spring of 2015 at the Florence Academy of Art. More recent inflences include the work of the Norwegian painter Odd Nerdrum.
Fergus was formerly an Aer Lingus pilot on long-haul 707 and 747 operations in North America, the Caribbean, Africa and the Middle East. He holds a first class honors degree in theology and biblical studies from Trinity College Dublin (MA, Dublin).
He is married to Sarah.
David Kassan
David Jon Kassan (born February 25, 1977 in Little Rock, Arkansas) is an internationally recognized contemporary American painter best known for his life-size representational paintings, which combine figurative subjects with abstract backgrounds or “tromp l’oeil texture studies,” Of this dual representation strategy Kassan notes, “my effort to constantly learn to document reality with a naturalistic, representational painting technique allows for pieces to be inherent contradictions; paintings that are both real and abstract.” Kassan's work is best classified as Social Documentary Painting, due to the importance and relevance of the subjects he chooses to represent.
In 2014, Kassan turned his attention to painting and documenting Survivors of the Holocaust, with the development of the EDUT project)-"edut" being Hebrew for "living witnesses" as a way of connecting with his grandfather's traumatic history of escaping ethnic cleansing on the border of Romania and Ukraine to come to America in 1917. The EDUT project's mission is to meet with as many living Survivors to the Shoah as possible and to document them in filmed video portraits and in paintings and drawings.
While many survivors have already told their stories on video (as in the Visual History Archive developed by the USC Shoah Foundation) or in memoirs, Kassan believes painting offers viewers a different kind of connection to the survivors, one that puts a personal face to the sometimes-abstract idea of the Holocaust.
In 2017, David Kassan partnered with the USC Shoah Foundation and the USC Fisher Museum of Art to develop the EDUT project into a Resilience Exhibition which will open at the Fisher Museum in the fall of 2019 in Los Angeles.
Kassan is a much sought after drawing and painting instructor because of his steadfast commitment to the age-old discipline of working from life and creating compelling expressions of the human condition. He has given painting/drawing seminars and lectures at various institutions, and universities around the world. In 2013, he founded the Kassan Foundation in hopes of giving grants directly to underprivileged talent in both the visual and musical arts.
Kassan works can be seen in many public collections worldwide.
Kassan currently lives in Albuquerque.
Nicholas Robinson
Nicholas Benedict Robinson (b.1974) is a graduate of the Crawford College of Art and Design, and completed post-graduate studies in NCAD in 2009. He was introduced subsequently to the American atelier system by the Irish painter Gearóid Hayes.
He has worked and studied in the Florence Academy of Art in Sweden, under the tutelage of the Swedish painter Joakim Ericsson, where he received two drawing awards. He returned to Ireland in 2013 and has exhibited at the RUA and RHA annual exhibitions, as well as in various group shows in Dublin galleries. Robinson paints in his studio in Wicklow and teaches in various institutions nationally.