BIO

Traditional skills // New energy

Ryan Peter French is a Manchester-born painter creating luminous oil paintings that fuse Renaissance technique with contemporary myth. Built through slow layers of glaze, precise drawing, and time-intensive craft, each work transforms lived experience into something physical. Through these methods, private emotion can emerge as something luminous and shared. Using traditional craft to communicate radical and contemporary ideas, his work reasserts painting’s capacity to carry philosophical meaning and emotional truth. 

Drawing on alchemy, consciousness, and myth, French paints bodies in transformation and architectures that refuse fixed reality. Images where past and future collapse into the same moment. His artwork re-wires tradition, pushing forward, made to speak to now.

His work reasserts painting’s capacity to carry philosophical meaning and emotional truth. These paintings are collected by those who recognise that in an age of speed and surfaces, time, skill, and meaning are radical again.