Bev Ryan is deep in conversation: She's painting. It is a familiar give and take with the canvas, yet the outcome is anything but certain. It's an open conversation. Any object or person in the area, even music, can be swept up into the picture to resolve the questions of color, form, story and technique. Pieces of reality penetrate the creative atmosphere like idea-asteroids, bombarding the conscience mind. Feelings are released from places deep inside that hold a thousand conflicts and a million memories. The painting takes on a character of its own as the conversation deepens and interpretations become clearer. Bev Ryan paints the tapestries of life.

Her work falls into two broad categories, fanciful reality and abstract reality. The fanciful reality paintings have faces and figures and are a playground for persons of interest. Even the abstracts have a fanciful life through patterns, movement, rich color, and images just a little out of reach. The titles are a giveaway: Cosmic Pomegranate, Deep Inside, On My Way Home 3, and Between Essence and Accident.

Bev Ryan has been an artist in residence and teacher at the historic Torpedo Factory in Old Town Alexandria for four years. She came to art later in life, leaving a career in audiology as one is drawn to a greater love. She started as a fiber artist and that is still very apparent in her work. She turned to print making and then painting. Art is the guidepost of her life and she wants to remain somewhere between searching and discovery - with each work an emotional, living twin of her inner conversations.