Ryan Lilienthal

In my recent work I explore what it means to have a sense of home and to know more intimately what I see and experience every day. My subjects are my neighbors, and what I portray is my neighborhood. In painting them I’ve come to appreciate an ephemeral landscape that lies within. Early on, my vision had been held hostage to the line separating one object from another. But life is not thus constrained. Rather than line, my work now lingers on shape, color, light, and shadow. Distinctions remain, but separations are softened. Each moment I render, even those that are still, slip into life’s flow.

As Ricardo Barros says of my work:

“It takes a certain resolve to stand one’s ground. Ryan Lilienthal, a painter, holds his footing in the space he inhabits. Rather than retell what we already know about the famous city in which he lives, Princeton, he focuses on the quiet, more intimate landscape of daily experience. Daily rituals - casual routines so familiar that we are often blind to them, and customs that grow ever more precious with the passage of time - are this painter’s subject.

Ryan’s paintings are instants vividly seen. In many ways, they are unremarkable events excerpted from life. They depict moments of poignancy. His paintings show us an array of unassuming gestures and interactions we later realize constitute meaning in personal experience."