Interview | Rob Ryan

Rob Ryan's intricate paper-cut pieces and screen-prints have been seen everywhere from the pages of Vogue to a birthday card that I sent my Gran. He was in the next room to us at the 'Pick Me Up' exhibition at Somerset House where he had transported his studio 'Ryantown' from the East End to the Embankment Galleries for the duration of the show. Visitors were free to walk around the studio, watching Rob and his team at work. Here's what happened when I caught up with the man himself.

Rob Ryan: Yeah it is a bit like being in Big Brother but it’s like there’s only a few people left in the house (laughs). I thought that at some point I’d forget that the cameras were here and that has happened. I thought I’d be a lot more self-conscious and a lot shyer than I actually have been, but to tell the truth I’m quite comfortable doing this and talking to people because it’s what I do all day anyway. It’s the one thing I’m quite confident doing. I remember someone asked Rod Stewart; “Do you ever get nervous before you go on stage?” and he just said; “What would I do that for? This is the thing I do. This is the one thing that is me.” I thought, ‘that’s quite cool’ and I kind of feel the same.

Rob Ryan’s assistant, Hazel, had asked if we could conduct the interview in the style of (80’s teen mags) Just Seventeen or Smash Hits so after a bit of research I kicked off with; ‘If you were a girl for the day, what would you do?’ – Rob just laughed for the next ten minutes:

Concrete Hermit: I got that from a Westlife interview.

RR: (still laughing) I’m actually really embarrassed!… I think I’d start by having a shower!

I gave up on the Smash Hits style and my eyes were caught by a series of ceramic Staffordshire dogs on Rob’s desk.

RR: I’m having a show in Stafford at the Shire Hall Gallery in November and for a few years I’ve messed around with ceramics. Not as a ceramicist but just as a sort of kind of decorator just to glaze. I’ve done tiles but it’s just like colouring in. I was offered the show and I thought ‘I haven’t got anything definite in mind’ but I thought about it a bit longer and I’d always liked those Staffordshire dogs, I just think they’re lovely.

I had this idea about having a ceramic show and working in the spirit of the things that I really like. I also thought it’d be nice to push it a bit further. I’ve been meaning for ages to make more and more ceramic pieces and really get on with it.

Rob then introduces me to the history of the ceramic Staffordshire dogs:

RR: You know they were originally fairground prizes? These fairs used to go all over the country and they were given out as the prizes; that’s why they’re found all over. I said to Kim Gould, [head of the exhibitions programme at the Shire Hall Gallery] “if you can find them blank, then we could just do our own dogs and our own cats.” She couldn’t find blanks but she did find a place that had the moulds and they’ve re-made them for us.
I’ve been wanting to do this for years but I’ve just noticed recently that Donna Wilson has started doing it too, but mine will be a bit different from that…

Concrete Hermit: Does being here at the ‘Pick Me Up’ show mean that things – certain projects, have been put on hold

RR: Everything is a weenie bit on hold. We’re not getting much done!

Understandable with the amount of people milling around Rob’s table; As we talk, he’s busy drawing up a new design and there’s a constant stream of visitors hovering over. It’s almost the end of the show, and I’d have expected Rob to be tired after ten days of being a living exhibit, but as the questions pour in he’s as patient as ever, joking with the visitors.

A woman asks what happens when he makes a mistake with the scalpel.

RR: Well, we just screw it up and throw it in the bin!

The woman seems a bit put out by this but Rob then patiently explains how works are repaired or rescued should anything go wrong. I guess his Rod Stewart anecdote is true, and it’s clear he really loves his work.

CH: How did you initially get into the cutout style that your now so well known for…

RR: I just did one, one day and it was really crude and it was nothing like this. It was like a folded piece of paper.

CH: Like the snowflakes you’d make in school.

RR: Exactly! I thought this’d be quite a good thing for me because it simplified everything. It stripped it down. It’s quite a sort of limited way of working and I think I always struggled with wanting to fit too much into a picture. It limited the amount of decisions I had to make. I didn’t really have to think about colour or tone or even perspective, it’s much more about the construction. Of the way all the pieces have to fit together to join up on one piece of paper. As such, that almost gave me the structural way of working. It made me choose the elements that I wanted to put in the picture to create the message.

CH: Speaking of the message: a lot of the work features text, poetic phrases and romantic notions, where do the words come from…

RR: I write a diary and write in my sketchbooks and I guess I lift them from there. They’re pretty much thoughts, which I jot down in sketchbooks and then just go to them when I’m at the studio and dig them out. I do little sketches of things and I join them together to make pictures, that’s what I think it is, just lots of little notes in books and stuff.

Having worked on a range of collaborations on a varied selection of projects such as; a window display for Liberty’s London and a project with British designer Paul Smith, I asked Rob which has been his favourite collaboration and why.

RR: I did a skateboard last year with some skateboard people called Love N Skate and that was pretty good. Stu who runs the company is really nice and they loved what I did. They didn’t want to change anything, they didn’t say “yeah we like that but it’d be great if you just change that or…” and I just knew that whatever I did they would think it was great because they wanted me to do it. I had wanted to do something with them for ages because I used to share a studio with them and I knew them as friends on a day to day basis.

I did something a bit different and we joke about it because somebody left a comment on their website about how it was great seeing Rob Ryan do something edgy. Whenever I see Stu, I always make a joke that “I’m trying to be more edgy Stu!” and they just take the piss out of me.
It wasn’t edgy at all it was a picture of this soldier, he’s got an erection and he’s painting it with gold paint, it’s kind of funny and silly more than anything.

In interviews and reviews of Rob Ryan’s work, the words ‘timeless’ and ‘romantic’ appear again and again…

RR: I don’t really like doing modern. I don’t really do cars or mobile phones, I just don’t like drawing those kind of things. It just looks silly when I do them and I’m not really interested in them, I don’t have anything to say about them.

CH: Do you think the way that most of your work seems to be surrounded by nature, it’s a kind of escape from city life? As you and your studio are based in the centre of London.

RR: Yeah, I think about this sometimes but in a way I find the city quite peaceful, and it doesn’t sort of stress me out at all. You know all these people that come to London and can’t cope with it, it just doesn’t really bother me in the slightest, it’s just a place. I think I said in an interview a while ago that I saw it as an escape in my pictures of an idealised version of the countryside and an idealised version of nature. So maybe as a city dweller I have this kind of romantic idea of nature or whatever. But I don’t do pictures about nature, I do pictures about people and nature is somehow in it and a part of it as well, you know.

Asking Rob about other artists who he likes or any artists which inspire him, we moved onto his love for more traditional forms of painting.

RR: I don’t think I get “inspired” by other work, in as much as it spurs me on to do more work. I recently bought the Grayson Perry Monograph and I was really inspired by his work and the way he talked about it and how hard he works. And I think that made me think ‘God, I could be doing a lot more different kind of work.’

CH: It’s the drive behind the work, more than the actual pieces themselves

RR: Yeah, if I see somebody and they’re doing something that’s quite challenging then I think well I should try and do something a little bit more. But you should just really do what you want to do, you shouldn’t force yourself to go and do something just because you’ve seen somebody else do something you like.
I like pictures that have got a nice kind of mood to them. I really like German Romantic painting like Caspar David Friedrich and Adolph Menzel and all these German painters where it was all about the landscape and how glorious it was. I think it’s all to do with mood and emotion and feeling, not that my work is anything like that. That’s just personally the kind of work I like.