BIO

Traditional skills // New energy

Ryan Peter French is a Manchester-born painter creating oil paintings that fuse Renaissance technique with contemporary myth, built through slow layers of glaze, precise drawing, and time-intensive craft. Through these methods, private emotion can emerge as something luminous and shared, transforming lived experience into something physical. 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 exist beyond a fixed reality. His practice speaks to art history whilst it re-wires tradition, pushing forward, made to speak to now. These paintings are collected by those who recognise that in an age of speed and surfaces, time, skill, and meaning are radical again.

METHOD

My practice merges Renaissance craftsmanship with contemporary ideas - each painting evolves from a combination of classical technique, embodied experience, and philosophical inquiry.

Psychogeography

The process often begins far from the studio. I walk through cities; Manchester, Florence, Rome; letting architecture, churches, alleyways, ruins, and unexpected encounters direct my attention. Whatever I capture goes into my collages or drawings.

Layering & Glazing

Colour is built slowly through renaissance glazing methods. Dozens of transparent layers alter contrast, depth, and skin temperature, engaging neuroaesthetic principles of prediction, surprise, and embodied perception.

Surface & Material Alchemy

I sometimes integrate iridescent textiles, reflective materials, or woven elements that extend the painting into real space. My new works are completed with hand-crafted frames that extend the painting’s architecture into physical space. I design these frames as sculptural continuations of the image - echoing its geometry, colour temperature, or symbolic motifs.