Ryan Ford: Brooklyn's the Borough

The painting is not finished, but it is still disturbing. A wrestler, dressed in purple, is in the center, a look of anguish on his face. His hands disappear into the mouths of shadowy demons. Standing all around him are gray-faced, leering spectators. One throws money, another has a pet monkey on his shoulder. Each has a distinct expression and personality. In the bottom right, almost as large as the scene in the center, a group of young boys runs around. The Bosch-inspired painting is bleak and barren, a battle scene in a desert.

The painting, with the working title Dudes of Destruction, is one of the latest works of Ryan Ford, a Bushwick-based artist.

Ford, thirty, is almost too large to fit in the small room in the shared loft space that serves as his studio. However, he is obviously right at home there. His sketches and assorted detritus cover every inch of wall space, and his paint-stained iPod plays from a corner. Works-in-progress are all around.

“I’m supposed to do this,” he proclaims.

Ford was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, and then moved to Pinehurst, North Carolina as a teenager. He attended the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia, and moved to Brooklyn three years ago.

Much of his early work is influenced by the Sienese school of painting, a flat Renaissance style. it. He combined this classical technique with pop culture, most often videogame imagery. Works in this style include Cloud Eater vs. Box of Hell, which depicts two figures about to fight, Tekken-style, in front of a distant mountain range.

However, he became dissatisfied with this style.

“I felt bound by landscapes,” he says. “I was stuck in those parameters.”

He moved into painting with airbrushing and stencils, laying down a shiny background over which he painted darker images than previous, like the “Globhammer,” “a wheel of sewage and bile that just smashes things.” The Globhammer series was his way of “dealing with darkness, the void.”

The Globhammer makes an appearance in Brooklyn’s the Borough, Ford’s most explicitly New York-influenced painting, smashing some of Bushwick’s run-down, vinyl-sided apartment buildings. A cartoonish figure with a plastic bag for a head walks down a gritty street where one building is on fire, and another has no roof. The painting’s anxiety and disgust is palpable. It’s part of a long line of art about disillusionment with the City.

“I got lost in dark feelings,” says Ford about the darkness of the Globhammer series. “I was having some feelings of despair, but however grimy it got, I was going to roll around in the muck.” This muck manifested itself in striking imagery of violence and grotesquery.

However bad Ford may ever feel, though, he will paint his way through it.

“I have an addiction to laying paint down,” he says.

Take a look at Ryan Ford's work here