If it has wings, self-taught mixed media artist Eva Ryan makes it soar. Her intricately detailed and thoroughly alive works, created primarily in graphite and ink, pose existential questions about existence, society, and morality within these pieces. Exhibiting nationally and locally, Ryan is currently a resident artist at the HUD Gallery in Ventura, California, with a solo show approaching in 2016 at the Buenaventura Art Gallery also in Ventura. Coming up January 9th, Ryan is participating in the group exhibition Bird, an art show at the Los Angeles exhibition space MUZEUMM, benefitting the Los Angeles Audubon Center at Debs Park.

Recent shows in Los Angeles, St. Paul, Portland, and Ventura featured works from her most recent series, Birds. In many cases, birds appear as a stand-in for human longing, emotion, and self-recognition in Ryan’s work.

Ryan has been working for over ten years, her creativity given birth by her art loving, talented musician/cinematographer father, who according to Ryan was also an alcoholic, a situation that naturally created considerable anxiety and stress for the artist as a child. Reading between the lines she now so intimately, minutely, draws, her father’s own belief in personal redemption through art was passed on to Ryan. “He instilled within me that …creating could save my life one day, if I ever needed it to,” she says.

Inspired by the book Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahlan, Ryan’s “Brain on Fire” features a wind-up bird with a vividly realistic look, pulling on a ring – which is attached to a string, linked to a human brain. Delicately detailed and rendered, with the words “the pull” repeated in small block print several times at the bottom and top of the piece, the overall impression is of urgency. The artist appears to ask what shiny thing the viewer pursues, what prize of love, creativity, success, or fear creates the pull in his or her mind.

Ryan’s piece “They Broke,” depicts an open-beaked bird and a pair of broken glasses. Created with pen and ink on watercolor paper, the artist’s deceptively simple description, “I used to have broken glasses,” conveys an almost universal truth. Who has not had something break in their lives – a relationship, an object, a dream? The bird’s open beak suggests this feathered creature is singing its own tale of loss and redemption. The idea that the artist “used to have” instead of “currently has” broken glasses leads the viewer down a personal redemptive path.

One bird that cannot take flight is the face-up dead pigeon in “Supine,” one of the artist’s older pieces in this series. This drawing, created with pen, ink, and clippings from newspaper obituaries on watercolor paper is nailed and mounted on wood with epoxy resin. The idea behind “Supine,” recalls the meaning of the word itself, of a being lying face-up. Here the question seems to be raised as to what we see when we look up at the sky. Mind as empty as a bird no longer capable of flight? Longing for heights not achieved or long past?

Her “High Fructose” pen and ink work is pressed between glass, framed within a vintage window. An expansion of an earlier drawing the artist re-discovered, the piece features brilliant blue birds imprinted on an apple and a pear, with a mason jar of brushes, textured yellow patterned wallpaper, and a bounty of cherries tossed on a table. These are the things that are sweet to the artist, perhaps – fruit, the birds whose images she cherishes, those walls, her art.

Of course it’s not all winged things that make Ryan’s work fly. “Strange Fruit,” is a graphite on bristol drawing that literally depicts unusual fruit on a thorny branch. Perhaps everything comes at a cost, such as plucking the sweet from a nest of sharp thorns.

“This Mess is a Place,” took Ryan 2 years to finish, an intensely detailed graphite, pen, and paint marker piece that features the bust of a voluptuous, topless woman whose eye make-up streaks down her face in her tears. A halo of skulls surrounds her, and behind her, strange flowers bloom. From between her bare breasts blooms a visible heart made of thread and suckled by bees. The question in viewers minds may be as to whether this deeply drawn piece represents a saint, an icon, or an ordinary woman who is extraordinary just for existing in a world where death may seem to triumph, in a world that makes her weep even as her heart is pulsing with life.

Ryan’s intimately drawn work is an outgrowth of her own self-teaching. “I had to put the time into teaching myself how to truthfully observe an object,” she notes.

The artist works in series which have a main idea behind them that serves as a commonality within that series, but birds remain her main subjects throughout her current work. She says that each of her drawings has its own concept, however, and that the pieces evolve daily while she shapes them, or as she explains her process, as she births an idea and allows it to take hold and “run away.”

The reason she lets these ideas metaphorically and literally take flight is to get in touch with herself and connect to others, Ryan explains. She says she draws primarily for herself, and for her father, who passed away at age 53, when she herself was just 17. “Every time I sit at my drafting table he is the first thing that pops in my head, if only for a second,” Ryan explains.

Ryan is currently working on a stunning drawing illuminated as if from within by glowing watercolors, including vividly colored images of two blue birds. The birds seem like the embodiment of the bluebirds of happiness, while a woman’s eyes observe the birds, a background of moths, and a heart. The image of the heart touches on Ryan’s earlier work, “Brain on Fire.” Both include a dangling ring, here labeled “pull here.” This piece appears to be a perfect continuation of Ryan’s visual and emotional themes. The heart, the birds – connection, purpose, freedom, love – and the moths? If we can’t be birds, perhaps moth wings can draw us, however briefly, to the light.

To see more of Ryan’s illuminating work, join her and other talented artists at MUZEUMM for the Bird exhibition at 4817 W. Adams in Los Angeles, opening January 9th, and check out her website at http://www.evaart.gallery/

• Genie Davis; Photos: artist