Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Painting, Printmaking, Drawing, Sculpture
Website: ryan-whelan.com
Ryan Whelan (b. 1991) is an Oakland-based visual artist originally from Torrance, California. He relocated to the Bay Area in 2009 to pursue his BFA in Printmaking from San Francisco State University, and has lived and worked in Oakland ever since. Since 2015, he has also worked at the Creative Growth Art Center, an Oakland nonprofit that supports artists with developmental disabilities through studio practice and gallery representation.
Whelan came up as a printmaker before transitioning into painting, bringing a printmaker’s sensitivity to surface and process into his evolving studio practice. He maintains both a painting studio and a fabrication workshop in West Oakland, where he has shared space with a community of fellow artists. He frequently collaborates with his partner, the artist Liz Hernández, with whom he first exhibited in 2016 at Good Mother gallery in downtown Oakland and has continued to develop joint bodies of work. Together they were commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco for the 2023 exhibition A Weed By Any Other Name.
Whelan has been represented by pt.2 Gallery in Oakland since 2021 and has mounted solo exhibitions nearly every year, earning consistent recognition within the Bay Area arts community and beyond. His work has been shown in San Francisco, Portland, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Paris.
Whelan’s paintings combine acrylic, soft pastel, marble dust, and propylene glycol on wood panels, often built up into gestural impasto surfaces that shift in appearance throughout the day as light changes. His technique introduces soft pastel’s unpredictable, fugitive character into the more structured properties of acrylic paint, using texture as a surrogate for color. The result is layered, light-responsive surfaces that seem to move.
His visual language draws on humble, elemental imagery—trees, fields, food, water, buildings—rendered through a flattened spatial logic that he describes as “impossible perspectives, which somehow don’t really feel impossible at all.” His paintings function as explorations of his inner world, using abstraction and semi-figuration as a mode of self-confrontation. Recurring themes include time, transience, the relationship between human experience and the natural world, and the construction of place through personal connection. A critic writing in 48 Hills described his paintings as carrying “agitated, impasto brush strokes that lend just about every work a thrumming sense of motion.” Whelan has also expanded into kinetic sculpture, with works featuring mechanical elements such as paper clay heads mounted on revolving steel tracks.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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