Ryan McGinness Describes His Work

Ryan McGinness makes no distinction between his artistic mediums.

Question: Do you distinguish between painting, sculpting and environments?McGinness:    No, I guess I don't.  I used to do more kind of instillation... sight specific work whereby I would go into, you know, a museum or a gallery or an environment... a space, a blank space and I wanted to create my own world in which to locate the paintings and the sculptures.  And I think I always wanted to do that as a way of owning the space but recently the paintings have gotten larger because I wanted all of the energy and all of the blood and tears that I have been putting into the walls which are essentially temporary to kind of go into the canvasses so that canvasses have become their own environments by shifting scales, yeah.

Question: Do you distinguish between painting, sculpting and environments?McGinness:    No, I guess I don't.  I used to do more kind of instillation... sight specific work whereby I would go into, you know, a museum or a gallery or an environment... a space, a blank space and I wanted to create my own world in which to locate the paintings and the sculptures.  And I think I always wanted to do that as a way of owning the space but recently the paintings have gotten larger because I wanted all of the energy and all of the blood and tears that I have been putting into the walls which are essentially temporary to kind of go into the canvasses so that canvasses have become their own environments by shifting scales, yeah.