To The Last Drop

Ryan Callanan is an artist working in contemporary printmaking and graphics. Already a prominent artist on the Street Art scene, the last three years have seen Ryan move away from this aesthetic towards a new practice that draws upon his in-depth knowledge of materials and craftsmanship acquired through his training in industrial model making and 3-D design. From the starting point of the emblematic visual sign, Ryan began a series of works using the smiley face synonymous with acid house rave culture in the 1980s. Working in bas-relief, this iconic motif was recontextualised by rendering it in material and style usually associated with traditional pub signs - gold inlay and black lacquered background. This highly technical skill obtained and finessed through Ryan’s parallel career in the sign making industry. This lead to a series of works in this visual style of the subverted pub sign, playing with further motifs such as the Cherry and the Watermelon of a fruit machine, again their meaning sent array using this simple visual pun. Ryan chose symbols to begin with as a means to accessibility, this is art that everyone can enjoy and understand the reference point. This is a common theme that has run throughout Giclée (pronounced "zhee-clay") is a neologism for the process of making fine art prints from a digital source using ink-jet printing. The word "giclée" is derived from the French language word "le gicleur" meaning "nozzle", or more specifically "gicler" meaning "to squirt, spurt, or spray". It was coined in 1991 by Jack Duganne, a printmaker working in the field, to represent any inkjet-based digital print used as fine art. The intent of that name was to distinguish commonly known industrial "Iris proofs" from the type of fine art prints artists were producing on those same types of printers. The name was originally applied to fine art prints created on Iris printers in a process invented in the early 1990s but has since come to mean any high quality ink-jet print and is often used in galleries and print shops to denote such prints. Ryan Callanan is an artist working in contemporary printmaking and graphics. Already a prominent artist on the Street Art scene, the last three years have seen Ryan move away from this aesthetic towards a new practice that draws upon his in-depth knowledge of materials and craftsmanship acquired through his training in industrial model making and 3-D design.