Ryan Muldowney is a teacher, painter, and creator and is currently an assistant professor of studio arts. These images come from his two series unravled I and unraveled II. Muldowney received a BFA from The University of the Arts in Philadelphia and an MFA from The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.  He lives in Virginia with his family and has also had works of fiction and non-fiction published.

How would you describe yourself as an artist? I am something of an artistic omnivore. My interests in art are various and I like to allow myself the freedom to explore any and all avenues of creation in the execution of my work. As a young artist I would often hear to my chagrin that it was important to consolidate your interests and develop a characteristic style, but this never sat well with me as I was unwilling to lay aside the sometimes-incongruous battery of artistic interests that continually held my attention. To this day I have never yet been able to settle down, and every time I stumble across something new that I like, I do it over and over again, refining and experimenting until the body of work no longer holds any mystery for me and then I move on to the next thing. I guess “mystery” is pretty fundamental to my work and to my process. I don’t like to be too facile or familiar with my materials because I hope that the work will reflect my uncertainty and thus open a doorway for the viewer to enter and to create enough room, hopefully, to wonder. I don’t wish for everything to be said or explicitly described, I don’t want the experience of viewing the work to be easy. Work that has that sense of mystery demands interaction, and I feel that although my studio habits may deny me a signature style, having a rambling practice creates infinite opportunities to examine the unknown.

You are what I would call an ‘East Coast Mormon’. Do you feel like you have a different perspective than many of the Utah-based Mormon artists? I don’t know that I have had many personal interactions with Utah-based Mormon artists, so I couldn’t rightly say how my perspective might be different. But it occurs to me, (and it may be an over-generalization) that the culture of the mountain west has, as far as I have been able to observe, a profound interest in the kind of professional “success” that is categorized by financial remuneration. Many of the Utah-based Mormon artists that I have observed from afar appear to have been the product of this cultural interest in financial “success”, and this seems to influence the kind of work that they make. Their work is often finely attuned to market forces. I say this not as a value judgment but merely as an observation of how my perspective may be different. I only ever make what I want to make, and I always make it with the full knowledge that I will soon be packing the work into storage when it is done, that few people will ever see it, and that the cost of materials, framing, etc. are a dead loss from a financial point of view. While this is clearly an impractical enterprise, I find that the compensations of absolute freedom are not inconsiderable.

Teaching has been a big part of your career. How has teaching affected your own development as an artist? So much in art is intuitive and too often critical aspects of the act of creation are not easily transmissible because it is difficult to fitly describe the experience. For me, therefore, teaching becomes an invaluable tool because it compels me to not be satisfied in understanding my practice merely by intuition, but to strive very hard to make the experience communicable in language so that others may begin to understand it as well. Staging projects that will most effectively draw out this understanding becomes essential and I do a great deal of experimentation in my own studio in an effort to transmit understanding of these difficult ideas. Thus, in striving to communicate the incommunicable not only are my students lifted, but I find myself enriched with new tools and processes that I can then use in my own work. There is a nice kind of symbiosis to that kind of relationship, and I value it deeply.

You once wrote, “I seek for mastery, not of process but of understanding.” I see mastery as one of the most important ideas to which we can cling in this life. It is an all-governing principle. I seek for mastery in all aspects of my life including my art. But I have unfortunately found mastering a process to be an unfulfilling shadow of true mastery. I have come to feel that possessing a superlative technique in painting or drawing or some other process is ultimately a dead-end as technical mastery only leads to the elimination of possible outcomes. I prefer to work inexpertly and with uncertainty so that by my struggle I may gain understanding of the intrinsic qualities of new tools and new materials, and by my experiments I create little worlds of possibility that are new to me and that allow me to understand a little more and see a little further into the darkness, into the great “mystery”. Mastery of understanding can only be purchased with the coin of inquiry, and I prefer a practice that is fundamentally questioning rather than being a master of process who can do nothing but make statements.

Visit Ryan Muldowney’s website.

Annastasha Larsen is a painter of fire. She grew up in Southern California amid annual wildfires that have been the genesis for much of her recent work. As she says, “I paint wildfires. Symbolizing the challenges of life bringing change and growth. Find beauty in struggle.” Larsen graduated from BYU. She, her military husband, and her one week-old child live in Mary Esther, Florida–our first artist from here in the Sunshine state.

You grew up in Southern California. Why do you think the forest fires of your youth provide so much of the subject matter for your art career? I grew up in Southern California and experienced many wildfires. I can never forget the sight of a smoke filled sky, ash landing on cars, flames, and the smell of burning. These experiences and memories left an impression on me of the power of nature. One particular experience was when I was in central California. My family was driving back home from a trip and we came across a wildfire. It was miles away, and we couldn’t see the flames. The smoke completely covered the sky and horizon in eerie colors, and mysteriously veiled the sun. I took pictures of that scene. It felt apocalyptic.

I felt overwhelmed and sad, but also wondered over this process of nature and just how small and powerless it made me feel as a human. Over four years later I came across that picture, while I was going to school at BYU, and decided to paint it for one of my classes. I wanted to depict a landscape scene that isn’t usually seen in artwork— that of destruction. The breaking down of nature through the element of fire. Though my work directly portrays destruction, I use color, perspective, style, and titles to make this body of work have layers of symbolism and meaning. I aim to direct viewers thoughts to nature’s process of destruction and rebirth and relate that pattern to our own lives.

You have had your share of challenges in life. Tell us what you think about the word resilient. When I think of the word resilient I think of overcoming great challenges and obstacles with brightness and hope. There’s an optimist feel to the word resilient. To me I think of someone who presses on through the storms and destruction of life, always looking forward and upward with hope. I also think of nature. Nature is incredibly resilient to the natural elements and disasters that befall itself. Seeing nature progress and change through challenges, is a reminder to myself to have faith, hope, and courage in my own struggles.

As an artist, how do you think your spirituality, your creativity, your voice, and your themes come together? With time and my own life challenges, I’ve come to better understand my subject and the important role my perspective and voice carry. My spirituality, creativity, voice, and themes come together in my paintings to share my testimony of Christ’s atonement, my own life challenges, and the optimism and hope I have for life. We, as children of God, have to experience opposition to know the good. That’s the whole point of this life, to learn, grow, and change with the struggles we face. My work is central to all these thoughts, beliefs, and experiences, coming together in a visual and tangible way.

What are you doing next? Having a baby, learning to find a balance between being an artist and a mother, and getting through my husband’s deployment. I also plan to take private lessons with another LDS artist in Utah, focus on making larger pieces, and continuing to share and sell my work. And I have a solo show I’m looking forward to locally, here in Florida, in the summer of 2016.

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Casey Jex Smith is another artist that I struggle to articulate. He is prolific, intricate, bizarre, humorous, and incredibly talented. His work makes me think what might have happened if Waldo had joined the Fellowship. Smith is a self-described ‘8th level artist’ and he obtained a BFA from BYU and an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute. He lives in Ohio with his wife, the artist Amanda Smith, and their children.

Your style is so unique. Do you get tired of describing and explaining your work? I do get tired of explaining. But not so much because my work is hard to explain, but because I know people are being polite when they ask. They aren’t interested. Very few people care about art. It’s hard to keep my wife and mother interested and they are both artists and invested in what I do. Then again I don’t speak with many artists these days. I guess if I wanted to keep it short and sweet and would say, ‘I mostly make drawings’.

You once said, “I am a big believer in putting your all into something.” It seems like that could describe your art career. Explain your evolution a bit. I think I’ve changed my mind a bit on that. I wish I had put more of myself into other things. I might have failed as an artist earlier and still have had time to change careers before I had kids. I might have learned a bit more math or taken some advertising classes. I am certainly not happy where I am as an artist and provider for my family. I still believe that if you want to be great in any of the arts, you do need to make tremendous sacrifice. Something big has to go like kids, videogames, or sleep.

You also once said, “Half of my original intent is to help push the definitions of what “Mormon Art” is for Mormons.” Are we as a Mormon community succeeding in that regard? I think our “Mormon Art World” has certainly diversified. There are plenty of artists that use their Mormonism in identity work and there are more artists that don’t use Mormonism identity in their work, and are successful, and happen to be Mormon. As always we have a large contingency of artists that have left Mormonism but still consider themselves culturally Mormon and still reference that part of their identity in their content. The MFA structure is just producing more of us and a few have had some moderate success. I don’t know if Mormon audiences are looking at art besides Greg Olsen. I know that my work has not sold very well within the LDS community. But if this audience is looking, there is a lot more to choose from than just 10 years ago. Mormons are cheap. That hasn’t changed. And the new race to the bottom with Etsy and prints just feeds into that cheapness. The BYU Art Department seems to be putting out some good graduates. Their visiting artist lecture series is well funded and brings in some heavy-hitters. There are some young artists like Noah Jackson and Jacob Haupt who are making some great work while still students. It’s fun to watch that program evolve. Still need to wait and see how many will be relevant in contemporary art. So far, only artists who have left the church like Wayne Thiebaud, La Monte Young, and Paul McCarthy have made a lasting impact.

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