Ryan Akerley

Filling In

2020

Ryan Akerley is a landscape painter based in Salt Lake City. He has always been intrigued, and inspired by the natural world. Learning to ski at age 5, and competing in freestyle ski...

Ryan Akerley is a landscape painter based in Salt Lake City. He has always been intrigued, and inspired by the natural world. Learning to ski at age 5, and competing in freestyle ski...

Oil painting on panel.

Oil painting on panel.

acrylic, mixed media on canvas My paintings explore the themes of light, atmosphere, and nature. The brushstrokes and saturated hues in my work aim to convey a sense of energy, move...

“Breathe Slowly/3” by Helen Mount immerses us in a tranquil dawn over dense forests and soft waves of mist drifting through the valleys. The light of the morning sky, colored in deli...

My paintings and sculptures bridge ancient and modern sensibilities. The subjects are often classical figures and portraits, but my use of materials is pure expressionism. I am mos...

"One Of The Ways" depicts a densely populated grove. As with other of Carpenter's paintings, this scene invites viewers to look closer and also to go out to explore nature. As a painter, I examine how the depiction of light contributes to our experience of paintings. The portrayal of light helps a painting to convey the atmosphere and mood of a scene, and is much of what enables a painting to convey depth and realism. Our perception of lighting features occurs largely through pathways in the brain that carry only black and white information, pathways which are distinct from areas that encode the colors and details we use to delineate specific objects. By painting in grayscale, I try to interact specifically with this region of our visual system, with the hope of conveying some of the spaciousness and emotional significance that light can imbue on scenes. Light, whether as the crisp contrast of a back-lit forest or the gray haze of an industrial landscape, is what defines a scene. Its power to communicate the feel of a place is the principle subject of my paintings. The Blue Azul Collection...