Cover Artist: Ryan Perea

Artist Ryan Perea has set a worthy challenge for himself: to make a living as a painter. He’s off to a great start. After training with some very skilled portrait artists in New York City, the Franklinton-area native has moved back to the northshore, where he continues to learn and practice his chosen craft.

“As long as I’ve been painting, I’ve been a portrait artist. It’s been people, people, people,” says Ryan.

This month’s cover is an example of Ryan’s meticulous style. While it’s a departure from the straight portrait perspective—he didn’t have anyone sit or pose for him—it’s still an exercise in capturing on canvas the person behind the image. He says it came about partly out of simple economics.

Artist Ryan Perea.

“The problem is that people don’t really want to buy paintings of faces that they don’t know,” says Ryan. “I was trying to think of a way where I could still do a face or a figure but make it so people—anybody—would want to have it.” Recognizing that many local artists, no matter what their normal focus might be, paint Mardi Gras scenes, he says, “I thought a marching band would be a good idea, really—just Mardi Gras in general.”

Ryan says he always had a knack for drawing and was in the talented art program in high school. He went to Southeastern Louisiana University but did not major in art. After graduating in 2003, he moved to New York. There, he encountered a serendipitous situation.

“It’s funny. I was living in a loft in New York around 2007. It was a slummy place, full of graffiti; it had character, though—it was neat,” he says, recalling the bohemian environment. “One time, I was taking trash to the trash room and there were three or four big canvases sitting in the trash with a bag of paints. I hadn’t painted in six years or done any drawing. When I saw that, I said, ‘I can’t pass this up.’ So that’s how I started. I had no idea what I was doing, but I loved it. It stuck.”

Not happy with the results he was getting, Ryan decided he needed some training. He found Rob Zeller, an artist who is originally from New Orleans, living in the Bushwick area of Brooklyn, near Ryan’s loft. “Rob studied with Jacob Collins in New York. Collins is a world-renowned figurative and portrait artist, a classical realist. Rob took everything I knew and said, ‘All right. We’re starting from scratch. I’m going to show you how to do this correctly.’ It’s all based on classical 17th- and 18th-century European drawing and painting techniques.”

After three years of study, Ryan left New York. He says, “I decided to move home just to focus on painting. New York’s pretty expensive. I taught talented art for a year when I got back because I needed a job. But painting full time was where my heart was sitting, and I said if I really want to do this, I can’t be doing two things at once.”

Upon coming home to Louisiana, Ryan realized that with the change in geography came a change in the artistic environment. New York City has seen a revival in classical realism, the genre that best represents his artistic focus. “Coming down here, I didn’t see as much of that; it was more whimsical, colorful things—which is great, but I didn’t see anybody in a more classic style until I saw one of Gretchen Armbruster’s nudes at Mo’s Art Supply. I said, ‘That’s the person I need to be talking to.’”

January/February 2012 Cover.

He ended up getting in touch with Gretchen (whose work has been featured on the cover of Inside Northside) and took some of her classes. Gretchen introduced him to Bobbie Chassaignac at the Louisiana Artists Gallery in Mandeville, which now features his work. He has one still life of apples there, but mostly there are portraits or figurative work that he’s painted from photos of his good friends. “I try to do other things, too, but nothing grabs me like doing people,” he says. He’d rather paint from life, but notes laughingly that his friends won’t sit still for eight or 10 hours.

The conundrum facing Ryan is, given that buyers seldom purchase portraits of people they’re not connected to, how do you make a living painting people before having a steady stream of portrait commissions? He’s finding the answer in creating images like his cover piece.

“Coming back to New Orleans, I noticed a lot of Mardi Gras scenes. I don’t want to fall into the same-old, same-old New Orleans scene. But if I do one, it has to be a scene that really grabs me, I’ll have to really feel it and I’ll have to ‘bring it’ whenever I paint it. I don’t want to run on the coattails of other people.”

With the cover painting, which is his interpretation of a photo of the Warren Easton High School marching band, Ryan certainly did “bring it.” “When I saw the photo, I was ‘Whoa, that’s a great image!’ Those guys made me feel like I was there, and that’s what I wanted to portray,” Ryan says.

The meticulously detailed painting took several weeks to complete, with, he says, at least two weeks spent getting the reflections in the marcher’s helmets just right. “Any time I’m doing something, I hear Rob Zeller’s voice saying, ‘You’ve got to keep going; you’ve got to keep going.’ That’s what makes me excited about painting—to try to get the person to be there, to be real. And to get their personality. It doesn’t do it for me if I can’t capture that,” says Ryan.

“There’s something about being able to portray a person on canvas that excites me to death.”

And that, for any young portrait artist, says it all.

Ryan Perea’s work is featured at the Louisiana Artists Gallery, 813 Florida St., Ste. A, in Mandeville. 624-7903. ryanperea.com.