I stumbled across Anne Ryan today. Lovely, sumptous surface and color and collages I am hungry to see closer.

In the context of a little old gallery exhibit brochure I found several images of collages and this little story...

It was the usual artist's dinner after a show opening in the early Forties: about twenty fellow artists and their friends met on their own turf in the Village for a Dutch treat celebration. It was a gala gathering at home after the exposure uptown. In those days, even with the refugees from the war zone in Europe, the art community in New York was small, almost familial. This was a dinner marking the opening of a show by Jackson Pollock. The artists came down from uptown on a Fifth Avenue bus and poured into a little Italian restaurant on the lower East side, There were close to a score of us, Pollock and Lee Krasner, Jackson's brother Sanford McCoy and his good-looking wife, Giorgio Cavallon, who already had shown for many years, Mother, me, and some veterans from Paris. We sat at two long refectory tables, and waiters kept filling our glasses with cheap red wine, red ink we called it. Pollock's show had opened at Peggy Guggenheim's, but no critic had shown up to review it. In that period, if a paper was going to write about an exhibit, the critic went for a look a day or two before it opened to the public.

There was spaghetti. More wine. Fruit and more wine. Everybody was talking, and presently one of the artists (I forget who it was) pounded the table with a real thump. He shouted, "They don't care! The critics! The galleries! The museums!" We all listened with a sense of agreement. "They just don't give a damn! And where does that leave us- it leaves us free, free to do what we want, the way we want to, to paint in our own special way, like Pollock's done."

- from a 1987 Washburn Gallery exhibit brochure, Anne Ryan & Circle, who quoted from "Anne Ryan, A Personal Remembrance," by Elizabeth McFadden, 1984

So that's what it is then. Artists making what we need to make (like this and this and what gets remembered are the loud guys at the table, the wine spillers, but the listeners and the wine pourers and the tiny collage makers ought not to be forgot.

Make, look, pour some more wine and speak up why dontcha?

take care,
Rachael