Punk and DIY Art by Ronan Boyle
Ronan Boyle, our featured artist today, creates work that is heavily influenced by punk and DIY art styles. Ronan is a self-taught artist. He was born in Derry, Northern Ireland and now lives and works in Vancouver, BC.
Ronan’s works often incorporate elements of collage and street art, left with a certain hasty, unfinished edge to them. This is in keeping with the DIY art ideology, which upholds anti-consumerist, do-it-yourself craftsmanship. He frequently uses spray paint, tagging his own images with random shapes or cryptic messages, sometimes blacking out the eyes of human subjects and cutouts. The paint is allowed or encouraged to drip downward, pulling at the image and adding a weathered aspect to many of the images. Ronan’s paintings are unpolished, but aggressive.
I like the way Ronan sometimes combines text with his images, creating a feeling of scrawled graffiti. Sometimes this seems like a purely aesthetic choice while other times the text add conceptual layers to the image.
