Well, actually I don’t appropriate logos and symbols but you could say that I appropriate the
aesthetic and so I go through a sketch process to develop each individual drawing and so if you
look at a painting and extracted one symbol, there is a development process that goes into
developing and creating just that one, that one drawing. And so like I said earlier when I was
growing up in Virginia Beach, I realized that, realized the power of icons and logos and symbols
and how they could transform otherwise ordinary objects by increasing their perceived value and
so I really want to assume that power for myself and so instead of simply appropriating logos or
icons that are anonymously created by corporations to stand for and symbolize any number of
goods and services. I really want to take that, again, that kind of power and use it to
communicate my own thought, ideas, or concepts and do so with an authorship that is
accountable and responsible for that image. And so it’s a subversion in a kind of way, it’s a
subversion of an aesthetic and again whereby I’m using that, those forms which is essentially
how I learned to draw by going through a design program, I learned how to create logos and
icons and all of the requirements that those entail, for instance, they have to be read quickly,
there’s, all the images are kind of distilled down to their essential forms and there’s a wide range
of scales, shifts and details within one drawing because each little icon has to be reproduced a
number of different sizes so it really has to draw up at different requirements that go into making
these kind of drawings. And again, I want to kind of see the power for myself to communicate
my own, you know, hopeful more poetic ideas than just, you know, whatever, you know, you
will see in our environment and iconic symbols and symbolizing something in a very kind of
blunt and pedestrian way because that’s the goal. So hopefully, you know when you look at a lot
of my drawings that again, are kind of embedded in the paintings, you do a double take and they
communicate more than they seemed to at first.
Maybe I’ve kind of become numb to it and I think it was a hotter topic maybe 5 or 10 years ago
and the fact that it’s not so much but it’s very telling and almost scary. But I think I, you know, I
believe in a kind of fight fire with fire approach so again, that is the world that we experience in
our daily lives and as a reaction, I want to create my own world that I want to share with other
people almost as an alternative to these other worlds, so you know if you can immerse yourself
in my world with, you know, through all the different things that I make, hopefully, it could be
more rewarding and in the end, I’m not trying to sell you anything, you know, just share some
ideas.
Well, I have a corporation. I have Ryan McGinness Studios Incorporated and I’ve other small
businesses maybe since high school. I think I started my first corporation. So I’m not necessarily
against corporations, I guess what I, more accurately I think what I would be against or it’s
people’s relationships to corporations and in corporation’s relationships to people even to the
extent that whereby corporations have a lot of ways have more rights than individuals and I think
it’s scary when a society is set up to give corporations more rights than it gives rights to
individuals. So corporations, in it of themselves, I’m not against. They’re kind of necessary legal
entities too and can do great and wonderful things for humanity but I think it’s how people react
to corporations and how corporations react to people on a very kind of human level, that’s
something to be worried about I guess.