Biography
Ronan Boyle was born in Derry, Ireland and then moved to Canada as a child in 1974. Growing up in West Vancouver, Boyle spent much of his youth surrounded by the serene, forbidding beauty of the Northwest Coast. Although Boyle is primarily a self-taught artist, he has extensive training in the rare finishing techniques of European decorative art. The influence of this highly technical approach to surface and materials can be seen in much of Boyle's abstract work, in which he builds a kind of topography into the texture of each painting. The abstract paintings are often described as being tranquil and meditative. Boyle's compositions are so calmly balanced that the viewer is centered at the horizon of an abstract landscape. Or perhaps they are seascapes, as there is a coastal feeling to many of his paintings. And yet, with their dark voids and expanses of drifting emptiness, Boyle's paintings always contain a counterpart of desolation. Ultimately these works express the beauty and loneliness of the human spirit. Boyle currently lives and paints in Vancouver. "Sean Starke, 2008"
