Bathurst Rhythms © Ryan Daffurn
I have had the unimaginable pleasure of forming a close bond with an incredible painter of my own generation: Ryan Daffurn. I secretly think he is one of the most skilled and genuine painters alive, his age notwithstanding. His work is formidable: the fluent synthesis of years of dedicated study and obsessive practice; his lines are sure and energetic, brimming with life.
I first made his acquaintance at the school he teaches at and co-founded in Brisbane, Australia, where his humble and attentive and famously slow and thorough mode of teaching quietly won me over. It was a long time before he showed me any of his drawings in aid of teaching, and when he brought out an eloquently hatched pencil drawing of a tree, curling off into space in all directions, I was shaken by the descriptive power of his restrained and firmly-placed lines. As a student, you place yourself trustingly in the hands of another, and I fear that too often this trust can be misplaced. When you see your teacher’s own rendering of the task you are battling, and their hand is decisive and elegant, and they present it to you quietly and humbly as but one method of working, little seeds of respect begin to take root.
Ryan is a teacher of great humility, and I am convinced that this is because he sees himself as an eternal student. He would rather listen than instruct. His respect for other painters–living and dead–is unending; his determination to find merit and to learn something from every work he sees is limitless. And when himself without a teacher, he turns to the physical world for instruction, stimulation and challenges. His devotion to his senses energises his work, but his inner world twists it imaginatively. Ryan’s work is idealised, re-envisioned, accentuated—beautiful lies delicately woven together into a seamless fabric. Through his incessant reinterpretation of the natural world—his sketchbook always to hand—I have learned to appreciate that art can be better than life.
If there was a living painter whose powers ought to be recognised, whose path ought to be smoothed, whose labours ought to be supported, Ryan Daffurn is he. The winds of change are calling him to Leipzig, where his hard-won abilities can be inspired afresh and wholly concentrated on his own work.
Ryan has a true reverence for art and its power to move us, describe us and even redefine us. His ambition is somewhat disconnected from popular notions of success: he is intent on doing his utmost to contribute something of real worth and meaning. And in my humble opinion, he is capable of anything.
