Studio Rayyan in moving!
*** I am slowly transitioning all my products from here on Etsy to my website at www.studiorayyan.com. Please visit the site for original art, stickers, greeting cards, and my full line of Magic the Gathering items. More items will be added soon. ***
About me:
Painting for me always seems to come back to story telling. Capturing/ recalling a moment from a different time and place. I paint mainly from memory, mostly false memory, of places I've never been, people I've never met and images from books that were never written.
Having to illustrate something which is already well known to myself and others is very hard for me, as I feel there are already many great examples of those well-known ideas out there, including preconceived notions in the viewers' head. However, tapping into the phantom library in the back of my head is a world of stories and images that have been "forgotten" and are more fun and fresh for me to play with. This last source is becoming increasingly important, as I strive to reclaim pictures from time and nostalgia, distorted and played with in the muddle of my melon, many of which feel like they have a past with me, but never finding tangible proof of their historic existence.
In my search for the source, I look at and study a lot of old paintings, from 16th century Flemish, to 19th and early 20th century book illustrators. If it's sparking my memory or feeding it, I'm not sure, but the search goes on...