Into the Void: Artist and Photographer Chris Ryan Ross

Lisa Belisle: Hello, I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you are listening to or watching Radio Maine. Today I have with me artist Chris Ryan Ross. Thanks for coming in and talking with me today.

Chris Ryan Ross: Thanks for having me.

Lisa Belisle: We had to ask you a few times to come talk with us. Did you have any sort of trepidation about having this conversation?

Chris Ryan Ross: No, not at all. Me and my family have had a very busy summer, and there's been a lot going on with us. We were actually gearing up for a year-long trip to the UK as a family, which has become a big job for us to get everything taken care of, from getting the dog on the plane to getting the kids in school, figuring all of that out. So that's a big thing, but we're really excited about it. So pardon me for having to put this off, but yes, that's one of the reasons.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I just wanted to make sure that we weren't intimidating you in some way.

Chris Ryan Ross: I think it's a little intimidating.

Lisa Belisle: You mean with the big lights around you?

Chris Ryan Ross: Yeah, and having seen the show. It's a little bit, I don't know. I find it hard to sometimes talk about the things I'm up to, but I think I can do it with you.

Lisa Belisle: I think you can. I think you're going to be great. You're actually used to being behind the camera and being the one who observes and creates out of your observations. So I think this is a shift for you.

Chris Ryan Ross: Definitely. Yes. I much prefer being that person than being in front of it. I like to observe rather than be observed.

Lisa Belisle: Did this start for you when you grew up in the Kennebunkport area? And you went to school down there. Did this start back in the day, has it always been this way for you?

Chris Ryan Ross: I was always into, I always loved drawing from life, drawing faces, drawing people. That was my quiet time as a kid and growing up. That was a big part of my childhood, being in art class, sitting for hours on end with sketchbooks and stuff like that.

Lisa Belisle: And why did you decide to go to the Rhode Island School of Design? What was the draw?

Chris Ryan Ross: I had seen my sister go off to Parsons in New York. She was two years ahead of me, and I got to visit her there. That was just so inspiring and amazing. But I also felt like if I went to school in New York, I would probably do a lot less work, just because of all the distractions. So when I saw RISD, it just seemed like such a great city. You had New York nearby, but you were also in this great college town with so many resources. And right before I did that, I went up to Haystack for a three-day weekend scholarship thing through high school. That was sort of an eye-opener, just to see all of these incredible resources in this remote location, from blacksmithing to metalwork to painting and all of those things. I was just like, okay, if they can do that here, then RISD must be unbelievable. And it was. I wish only that I could have taken more advantage of what I had at my fingertips there.

Lisa Belisle: And Providence is such an interesting small city.

Chris Ryan Ross: Yeah, it's great.

Lisa Belisle: My daughter went to Providence College, so we spent some time down there. It's a little bit like Portland in some ways. It's kind of that same size, but also like really different pockets of different people doing different things.

Chris Ryan Ross: Absolutely. It's even gotten better, I think, since I've left there. That was like 20 years ago. A good friend of mine is now back at RISD teaching as a professor, so we get to go and visit him. It's just so great to go back and to feel that energy of the town and the students. There's a lot more going on now than there was when I was there, for sure. But it's a great place.

Lisa Belisle: You initially took more of a photography approach to your art, and at some point you must have had to make a decision among all the different things that you could pursue that this was the direction you wanted to go in. Why did you go in that direction first?

Chris Ryan Ross: I was always using photography as more of a tool for drawing. Drawing from photos, or painting from photos, working from imagery. And my dad, he still is a hobby photographer, but he always had a camera with him. I just kind of learned how to use 35 millimeter from him through osmosis. He would have old Minoltas kicking around and he would give me one, and I would learn to play with that. I was kind of a Luddite when digital photography came out, because I was so used to those SLR lenses and all the settings, actually having to put a non-lithium-ion battery in a camera just to keep certain functions going.

But yeah, I was always using it as a tool, and then getting out of school and eventually finding my way into the magazine world for a career, that became the creative outlet for me. That seemed to make sense. I started seeing photo shoots happening and productions that were really interesting. It wasn't painting, it wasn't fine art, but it was still exciting and creative. And that sort of had that happened, I just found my niche in photography, I guess. I think that's how it happened.

Lisa Belisle: And my understanding of the current series that is available to look at through the Portland Art Gallery and on the website is that photography actually had a piece in inspiring that series, because it was initially a picture of your niece that you took doing a cannonball into a pool, I'm guessing.

Chris Ryan Ross: It was actually out in Vinalhaven. We had our family over from the UK, and these kids had never really been to a quarry before. It's such a Maine thing to do, to go into the middle of the woods and stand before a dark body of water that's sort of manmade, but not really meant for swimming. It was just a hole that was dug, that got naturally filled with water. I think the kids were a little bit freaked out by it. They'd seen too many Stephen King movies. But at the same time, everyone had to jump in. So it was really fun to watch that. I always usually have a camera on me anyway, so I was just observing and watching, and there's these kids from England, my nieces and nephews, that were gearing up to jump in, and just that excitement, but that fear, all of those emotions were at play, and exciting and energizing.

And yeah. So I was just snapping a bunch of shots, and I kept thinking to myself, I really want to do something with that feeling that I got from watching and observing that overcoming of that fear of jumping in the water. So I just started doing these sketches based on an image that I'd taken. And then I like to put the photo away after I do a study, and sort of build the study from the image that I've sketched or painted or somehow scribbled. That's sort of what I did. I did loads of just studies, because I felt like there was more to just a cannonball jump. There was stuff going on with the water.

There was stuff going on with tension in the body. So I started focusing on those studies and eventually just started scaling up and scaling up, and did a big one. I really liked that way of working. I think that's the way that I'll continue to work for a little while. It's just going after something and discovering as I'm going, not really knowing what I'm going to say until it's just saying it by itself, I think.

Lisa Belisle: I think the fact that you're describing it as being a quarry, and having been from Maine a long time, I've gone swimming in those quarries, and you're absolutely right. The water is very dark and it seems very deep, and it's a little bit intimidating. But the fact that then your niece would be like, yeah, I'm just going to take this on, I'm going to fully commit myself to doing this, and then do that cannonball, take that big risk. For me, it embodied something that was very relatable emotionally, this idea of being that kid and thinking, all right, I'm really scared, but I feel like I could do this.

Chris Ryan Ross: Yeah. And I love the idea of throwing yourself into a void. One of my friends was saying that it's kind of just like any painting that you do, you're just staring at this void. You're staring at a blank canvas, you're staring at a blank piece of paper, and you have to just make a mark or start somewhere. I liked that similarity, that you're just going to go for it. It's not like you're going to die, but you're still getting over a little bit of a fear, and then eventually you start climbing higher on the rocks and jumping higher and higher until you can't get any higher on the rocks. There's just something to that buildup that is really just about summer in Maine to me.

And it's also kids jumping off of a dock, and the ferry's coming and they jump into the thrust of the bubbles. I love that. It's just joy, it's fun. And for me, getting back into painting after having been on a painting hiatus for a while because of my job, because of photography, I felt like I needed something light, and not so heavy, to focus on something that brought me joy rather than something that was political or dark or sinister. Even in that, some people have said that some of the jumping pictures are a little bit dark. I think that's true, because there's definitely some fear in the water, and people sometimes are afraid of water, people die swimming.

I was trying to have a lot of different feelings with not just the form of the human, but also how we're going to make that water work, and what we want that water to look like. And also trying to make that water not photographic and make it a painting more than anything. And also make the flesh more painterly and less photographic in the marks. A lot of those were a case of wiping and adding, and so much subtraction. Hours and hours of lost work, coming in the next day being like, wow, everything's gone that I just did, and redoing it. For me, that's a process that I really like. That comes from just early days of school and foundation classes of drawing, where your teachers are trying so hard to get you not to commit to the form or the shape until you've erased and added and erased and added until you have like a ghost there. That's actually a good template to work off of. That's kind of how I've been doing those paintings.

Lisa Belisle: So knowing that, it makes it even more impressive that you chose to do this image in series and really try to explore all the different ways that you could have this active human body interacting with this natural body of water, and to be able to show up the next day and think, okay, how can I see this a different way? How can I put this on canvas in a way that is slightly different than before, but still maintains a theme. That takes some ongoing focus that not everybody feels comfortable with having.

Chris Ryan Ross: Yeah. You could call it focus, or you could just call it craziness, or obsession with just repetition. I feel like that's definitely one thing that resonates with me, is repetition. I'm a victim of observing people, other artists in history that have done repetition. There's just something to be said about that. You've got to get something out of your system. For me, the way that I was trying to do that was just to do it over and over again. Because every time I would finish one, or think I was finished with one, I would feel like, wait, I want to try to start that one a different way again and give it a different feeling somehow. Just changing colors can make everything different, everything changed. So yeah, I love it. My wife thought it was kind of crazy and she was like, you get to do something different, right? But I just kept at it until I felt like I could stop. But I still feel like I want to do more.

Lisa Belisle: You sort of stopped, but also possibly leaving the door open, just in case.

Chris Ryan Ross: Yeah. I often go to bed thinking of different colors that I want to explore, or changing the body somehow, just giving it a different feel, a different look. For me, it's just something I'm right now obsessed with, that jumping into things. I like that.

Lisa Belisle: Well, it makes me think a little bit of the artist Jean Jack and the barns that she does. You can look at one barn, but you're only looking at one barn with one backdrop and one way of approaching it. You really can do a lot with one image. You can really look at it in a lot of different ways.

Chris Ryan Ross: Yeah.

Lisa Belisle: As you're thinking about moving to the UK for a year, do you think that's going to shift the way that you approach the work that you do?

Chris Ryan Ross: Definitely. I often think about landscapes, and England is just so beautiful. The area that we're going to is Somerset. It's just gorgeous green, lush, rolling hills. It's totally different than here, but in a lot of ways very similar. Not as cold in the winter, and always green, never not green. I get really inspired by the landscape every time I'm there, but I've never been there long enough to really soak it in enough. It's like five days here or 10 days here at the most. But to be able to go over there for a year, I think that I can really start to figure something out. I feel like there's a lot of observing to do there, to figure out what the next series might be, or the next few drawings or sketches or paintings.

It's hard to go to this area and not be inspired. So I'm really looking forward to that. There's also loads of interesting artistic things going on in that particular area, so I'm excited to get connected over there with other artists. There's one person whose work I've been looking at. He does egg tempera landscapes, and I'm not even really that into that, but when you look at these pieces, they're beautiful. His name is escaping me right now. But I'm hoping maybe I can connect with him over there and just see his studio.

Lisa Belisle: When I hear about you going to the UK for a year and hear about the work that goes into going to the UK, and it sounds like children, school, all of the stuff you need to do, that is a tremendous amount of effort and investment. And a lot of people love this romantic idea of taking a year and doing something different with their lives, but not everybody is capable or willing to cannonball into that void. So tell me, what was the tipping point for you? How did you get to the place where you're like, no, this is really what we are going to do. We want to do this, we're committed to doing this. What was it that caused you to really want to pursue it?

Chris Ryan Ross: I think it just made a lot of sense, logistically with the age of our kids, and pulling them out of school at this time where it's not really going to make a big difference for them. Eighth grade is really not going to make a difference if they have it here or have it there. And our youngest is going into third grade. So that was a big part of it. But at the same time, we've been talking about it for a long time, and I feel like every piece just kind of came together, and I started painting again over a year ago. That was something I had been really hoping to do. So it's just all these little things that we've been slowly wanting to get back into doing, or hoping to do, these little dreams. We just started pulling them in, I guess, and rather than talking about them, just trying to logistically figure them out. One of the things that me and my wife were doing a lot was production and producing. So right now we're really heavily producing our next chapter.

Lisa Belisle: And I assume your wife has a UK connection, because you're mentioning relatives.

Chris Ryan Ross: Yes. She's a citizen. Yeah.

Lisa Belisle: So how did you meet your wife?

Chris Ryan Ross: We met through work. I was a photo editor at Lucky Magazine at the time, and she was working for a photographer in New York as a studio manager. We just chatted on the phone and always had really nice conversations. She was from the country and I was from the country, and probably we just weren't those hardened city people yet, and actually didn't ever turn out to be that way. We met over the phone and eventually met in person and everything aligned, so it was nice.

Lisa Belisle: And what's her perception of Maine, since you've moved back?

Chris Ryan Ross: She loves it. We met in New York and then moved here in 2014. And before then, I would come up on trips. I think she was always like, wow, Maine, I don't really know anything about that. But then I met this guy from Maine and he took me to see where he lived. It's always really gotten in under her skin in a really good way. Maine's hard not to, people just love Maine. So being from here has always been helpful. I can really say I'm from Maine. Well, I'm from Maine, but most people don't think Kennebunkport is Maine, but it is.

Lisa Belisle: Yes. Well, I work in the Waterville-Augusta area. And it is very true that if you're below maybe Gardiner, it's like, no, that's pretty much just Boston, or a suburb of Boston. But I agree with you. I think the southern part of Maine is very different in different places, but it really does maintain, considering how populated it has become, its very specific charm. And it's got little pockets. Kennebunk, Kennebunkport, that area is just gorgeous.

Chris Ryan Ross: Yeah, I love it. Growing up there as a teenager, you're always like, ugh, get me out of here. But now we look back and we're like, wow, we had such nice, great summers, great summer jobs, going to the beach after work in the summer, hanging out with friends. I definitely had really good friends growing up in Kennebunkport and still maintain relationships with them. Maine is a special place.

Lisa Belisle: So I understand that you have a Georgetown connection.

Chris Ryan Ross: Yes. Yep.

Lisa Belisle: Tell me about that.

Chris Ryan Ross: We've been building a little cabin up there for the last two years. We've been basing ourselves up there this summer, trying to finish it, desperately trying to finish it. We'll probably be driving the last nail in as we're getting on planes to go. It's just an area that we discovered together a few years ago during the pandemic, on the endless amounts of getting out of your house and trying to get into nature. That was just an area that we loved. It was only an hour from Portland, and we just couldn't believe that we hadn't explored more. There's so many gorgeous trails to hike on, and if you like boating or water, to have that just an hour from Portland is fantastic. So we've been up there all summer and just absolutely loving it. It's just peaceful and quiet, and the mosses and the trees and all the bird songs. It's just been a really beautiful place to be.

Lisa Belisle: And I find Georgetown interesting because Popham Beach is one of my favorite beaches in Maine. But Reid State Park is up in Georgetown. And they're not that far away, as the bird flies. But they're very different in the type of beach and the interaction with the water that each of those locations is.

Chris Ryan Ross: Yeah. And a lot of people that I talk to are like, Georgetown, where's Georgetown? That's usually the response, because there's St. George and there's others, and a lot of people just don't, it's one of those towns. It doesn't have a main street. It doesn't have a high street. It has the Five Islands, and it has a general store and a post office and a library, but it doesn't have a big street that you walk down with brick buildings. So that in a lot of ways made it special, because you have to go to Bath if you want that. That's pretty much the closest town, or Brunswick, or a little further north to some of the other midcoast towns. But the fact that when you're there, you're kind of there, and you feel like you're on an island, but you're connected by land. You've got the Sheepscot River, which flows right out into the Atlantic, and it meets the Kennebec, and it's just such a beautiful place for getting on the water. You can do it in a really nice, gentle way by going upriver rather than out to the open rough seas, which we stay well away from.

Lisa Belisle: So every piece of you that I'm gathering from this conversation suggests that you've made not one and not two, and maybe not even three, but lots of different changes in your life in a relatively short period of time. You've moved away from being a photographer. You've moved away from being in New York. You're going to spend a year in the UK, you're building a place in Georgetown. That is a lot of transitions for you and your family, but it seems like you're not intimidated by that fact. You're like, no, I'm just going to embrace this. This seems like the right thing to do.

Chris Ryan Ross: I'm trying to. I mean, trying to just get rid of that fear, and just try to live and make everything work, and try to work as hard as I can to support all of those things. So it's definitely an interesting time, but very exciting. And oftentimes I feel like you can sit back and see a lot of people doing all these great things, and eventually there's a tipping point and you want to try to do some of that as well. It's hard, it's not easy. But we've been trying just to chip away at some of the things that we know are going to enrich our lives and the lives of our children, and try to do it as smart as we can.

Lisa Belisle: And I think it's interesting. One of the things I've learned having been in Maine essentially all my life, except leaving a few times to go to medical school, to be born in Vermont, my family's from Maine, but I wasn't born here, so I don't get to be called a Mainer. So to your earlier point, it's okay.

Chris Ryan Ross: We forgive you.

Lisa Belisle: Thank you. It's ironic, since most of the rest of my nine brothers and sisters were all born here, and I'm one of the few that wasn't. But all that being said, there is something interesting about Maine, in that sometimes people who are here, they are here and they never leave. And I think there's something fascinating about that as well. I can talk to people and I will say, oh, you're from this part of Maine, have you ever been to this place? Which might be literally over the river from where they are. And they're like, oh no, I don't go there very often. For me, that's a very different feeling of just pleasure and being rooted, really deeply rooted in the state. And that fascinates me.

Chris Ryan Ross: Yeah, it has a hook. It really has a hook. There's no denying its beauty, and you get these beautiful, warm summers. This one hasn't been that great with the rain, but you get the harsh winters, and it takes a lot to really commit to living here year-round. But it's a fantastic place and we feel so lucky to be here. We've had people that we've met over the years that we have been here. I never thought I'd come back this early. Early on, I never thought I would come back. I thought I would come back to visit my parents and do that sort of thing, come back every summer. But trying to raise kids in New York, and coming up here and seeing what's available at that time, it's changed a lot, but when we did it, it was like, wow, okay, we can maybe make this work.

We started working remotely in 2014, and everyone that we worked with in the industry was like, wait, so you live in Maine, but you travel to LA and New York for photo shoots? And we're like, yeah. And then the pandemic hit, and there were all these emails coming out, hundreds of thousands of dollars that companies were paying consulting firms to teach people how to check emails remotely. And we're just laughing, because it was like, wow, we've been doing this since 2014. It's totally doable. It's an amazing place to be. We're lucky that certain areas have the connectivity that we have, and we've been able to maintain our jobs since we moved here in 2014, up until 2022, everything was working just fine. We could have been anywhere really, but we were here and it was the right place to be.

Lisa Belisle: So now that you've fully committed yourself to this next phase of your professional work as an artist, have you had to think about things differently in any way? You were working for other people and now you're working essentially fully for yourself. Have you had to change the way you think about your work, or about the way you bring money into the household, or being a business person? Because that's a big shift.

Chris Ryan Ross: Definitely. Pretty much not saying no to anything that's coming in. Outside of painting, I'm fully freelance, doing producing and still doing photography, just not for big media companies right now. If I am doing anything, it's on a remote or freelance basis, which has been great. But trying to manage that schedule with the schedule of packing and organizing is very tricky. You want to be able to say yes to everything, but you can't. So luckily we have some great connections that we've made over the years, me and my wife, that we're both basically in the same industry. So that's been great. We keep that going. And a lot of that, when we go to the UK, we can keep going there.

Although I do want to try to root myself there as well, and try to branch out rather than just trying to maintain something here while we're over there. So it's definitely tricky, but we're trying to figure it out, and we don't have all the answers yet at all. But so far we're okay. I think we just have to try not to let the fear take over, and just focus on getting through it, making it work, staying positive, and hopefully there'll be some time to paint in there.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I'm interested in this in part because one of our sons, who went to Savannah College of Art and Design, is a photographer, and he is also trying to figure out a way to support himself but also do freelance photography. And it's an interesting balance. Because if you're working for somebody else, you are on their schedule and on their dime, but that's security. If you go to work fully for yourself, you have a lot less security, but more flexibility, and that ongoing tension I think creates a different sort of existence than a lot of people are familiar with.

Chris Ryan Ross: Yeah. And also, having had a full-time job for the last 13 years, it's definitely an adjustment, but at the same time I'm like, actually it's really nice not having a boss anymore. It's really nice not having to do those silly things. And right now I'm very okay with that.

Lisa Belisle: Well, maybe I'll have him reach out to you, if you can give some tips and tricks as to how to handle this. Because if I'm being completely honest, I don't actually like having a boss either. My husband has often said this to me, which may be a point of interesting conversation in our relationship. But I do think that the thing about not having a boss is that you are your own boss. And you actually have to be really good at managing and leading yourself. And for some people, it's actually easier for them to have a boss than to be their own boss.

Chris Ryan Ross: Absolutely. Or you may like it for a while, but then eventually you just have to call it quits and go back and get the sort of corporate job. Right now, I'm leaving all doors open. But I'm very happy where things are at right now, and I'm excited about not really knowing what to expect. That's something that's really different than the last 12 years of my life.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I am really pleased that you took the time out of your extremely busy schedule, and now I completely understand why it's been hard to get you to commit to come in and see us. Because it sounds like you are juggling quite a bit right now.

Chris Ryan Ross: But it's good juggling. It's only three balls or so. Not like flaming things.

Lisa Belisle: All right. But still, I think having this conversation with you at this particular juncture of your life, it'll be fascinating to see, fast forward 15 months or so, when you've come back from the UK, when you've maybe rooted yourself in another place and then come back and rerouted yourself here. It'll be really interesting to talk to you again and see what your observations are.

Chris Ryan Ross: Definitely. I look forward to that.

Lisa Belisle: I've been speaking with Chris Ryan Ross, an artist who is from Maine and is represented by the Portland Art Gallery, but clearly is so many other things. It's been a pleasure to speak with you today. So thank you for taking the time.

Chris Ryan Ross: Thank you so much for having me.

Lisa Belisle: I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you have been listening to or watching Radio Maine.