Ryan C. Brown’s paintings capture the essence of nightlife, rain smells and dog walking

Ryan C. Brown’s paintings take place in the very moment that the lamp posts turn on – you know that magical moment. Just before it gets too dark, the amber lights flicker on to hem the paths and leak into alleyways. In these paintings, Ryan creates a curious character study of evening dog walks and nightlife inspired by photos that he takes of the world around him, developing a large archive of screenshots from films, images he’s stumbled across online and of other art pieces. “I’m inspired by impressions of charged and evocative atmospheres,” says Ryan. “Often nebulous memories of places from my childhood.”

These paintings feel warm and cold at the same time, utilising darkness magnificently. In one painting, a car’s headlights beam into the night, but Ryan’s oil painted brushstrokes make the light feel physical, like it is curving down like water. Ryan paints stars in glowing pinholes or celestial snowflakes – flowers look like foldable paper fans, pets look like spiky cut-outs, and falling urine against a tree replicates the imagery of dancing rain. Each painting has a gentle feeling of petrichor – the pleasant smell of rain after long summer days.

Ryan’s playfulness with shape, light and mood is what makes these paintings so eerily familiar, moments caught in the in between. The vision is completely his own; he rotates his paintings every few days in order to find other angles to the scene. “When I’m about to start a body of work, I commit at least a week to sketching in a loose and improvisatory way, listening to music, staring into space,” says Ryan. “At a certain point, these sketches make their way onto canvases. Even at this point, when I’m working on canvas, the composition is likely to change – it rarely resembles the original sketch.”