A Cacophony of Color

From rural Maine, she writes: I am working furiously on the Iraq painting—in the day, soft rain hitting my skylight, turning the grass lush neon green, the goats are happy, the red barns slick with color. My studio is the best part. It is a square monk’s cell, clean, and spartan, with a pale gray floor, a skylight, and white walls.

She, Megan Rye, sits bent over her canvases for hours each day, painting with intensity, at a place called Skowhegan, which offers one of the most important residencies to which a young visual artist can be accepted. She paints a world of abandoned subterranean spaces dense with objects. Her paintings are dark, contained, controlled, painted with a quarter-inch brush. From her tiny brush, explosions of color light up the dark spaces where her vision lives.

“Megan sees a cacophony of color and shape emerging from urban life,” says Robert Fishko, owner of the influential New York and Los Angeles Forum Gallery. “She has a very fresh and different melody to sing, a new image to offer. In all of the arts, you have to produce what you produce with a real authority. I sense that this young artist has the kind of authority that will propel her toward tremendous success. I look forward to working with her for a very long time.”

Fishko has taken serious interest in Rye’s paintings, and Forum has chosen to represent her, showing her work to collectors, museums, and art critics. Next summer, she appears in a group show presented by Forum—an honor and a level of distinction that most painters never come near. For any artist to achieve the recognition of industry publications and major galleries is significant. To have that kind of attention when you are twenty-nine years old, as Rye is, is almost unbelievable.

Rye had an unusually rigorous education in her craft and has studied art since the age of five. Born in Seoul, South Korea, she met her adoptive family at seven and a half months. Her mother, Karen, with whom she is very close, remembers that her daughter was “always able to make something out of nothing.

“When she arrived from South Korea, she already had incredible fine-motor skills,” says Karen. “She’d been left alone a lot, and not having toys and an enriched environment, she used her hands to entertain herself.”

Not a social child, Rye retreated into a world of art early on, where she was comfortable and could create as freely as she liked. “She was always expressing herself in a wonderfully visual way,” says Karen, who recalls when Rye was in grade school and made a clown for art class. “She made a fabulous clown, but it was not [the teacher’s] clown, so I said, ‘Good for you. Don’t make Mr. Benson’s clown. Make your clown, and keep making your clown.’”

While attending Edina public schools, Rye also took classes at the Edina Art Center. She spent hours in the basement at her drawing table, drawing precise architectures, or in the kitchen, painting still lifes using pointillism. During her freshman and sophomore years in Edina, she also took classes at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, where she was approached by a faculty member interested in tutoring her privately. She studied closely with that teacher during her final two years of high school at the Perpich Center for Arts Education, graduating in 1994.

Rye studied art history and painting at Rhode Island School of Design, completing her BFA in Rome on RISD’s European honors program and graduating with honors in 1998. She stayed in Rome to study for two more years before returning to the States. While completing her master of fine arts at the University of Minnesota, she received a graduate research grant and a graduate school fellowship from the U of M—and a lot of attention from artists and critics of note.