Annemarie Ryan was born in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia and now lives in Georgetown in Washington, DC. She developed a love of and showed a gift for painting and drawing at a young age but being from a family of eight children was unable financially to pursue an educational path based strictly based on art.
After a lengthy career in national politics and public service, she was able to return to her love of art full time. Shortly thereafter, she became one of 40 Artists in Residence at Georgetown’s historic Jackson Art Center.
Within a year of pursuing her dream, she was invited to show five of her paintings at Van Der Plas Gallery located in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.The Gallery has been known for discovering emerging abstract and street art artists since the1980’s. In advance of her participation in this exhibition, titled “A Changing Landscape: The Female Eye,” artnet News, singled out her participation in its weekly “Openings Not to Miss in New York City,” saying “One highlight of the exhibition is the work of Annemarie Ryan, a DC-based painter whose lyrical compositions harken back to the female abstract expressionists like Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler, with contemporary sentiments imbued with societal and cultural sensitivities.”
In less than three years, she has created more than 300 works of art. Her paintings have been featured in Condé Nast’s House and Garden Magazine and are in the homes of collectors in New York City, Key Biscayne, Delray Beach, Jackson Hole, Martha’s Vineyard, Boston, Laguna Beach, and Washington, DC, among other locations.
Her body of work spans the spectrum of her broad and diverse interests and personal experiences, including the sudden loss of her mother when she was in her twenties. Having begun as a watercolorist and color field painter, she used pastels, charcoal, graphite and oil paints to further develop her use of the color spectrum. She now paints primarily with inks and various forms of acrylics and has developed a technique to blend them to create paintings that have the ability to draw the viewer into her own unique interpretations of life experiences and their deeper meanings in true technicolor.
She currently paints out of her own studio, AnnemarieRyanArt located in Georgetown, Washington, DC.
