Ryan Travis Christian

Just beyond the skyscrapers of the greater Chicagoland area is an archipelago of residential communities known as the suburbs, a sprawl of townships that offer a sweet spot between urban and rural culture. While some may dismiss these enclaves as bland, those quick to judge just don’t appreciate the nuance. A suburban lifer by choice, Ryan Travis Christian spends his days drawing and viewing the world from the comfort of his hometown of Warrenville, Illinois. At first glance, there is a cozy, pleasant familiarity enveloping his work that recalls old timey comics and cartoons. But don’t take Ryan’s rubber hose content strictly at face value. Study his drawings long enough, peel back the initial layer of his scenarios, and behold their provocative core. Since we’ve both been sequestered in the Midwest during this pandemic, I had the geographical advantage of being able to venture out, meet Ryan on his home turf and witness his eye-bulging imagery first hand.

Ryan Travis Christian: Yeah. All my formative years from seven or eight years old till now have been spent in the suburbs.

 

In middle school, my half brother introduced me to a handful of different things, from hip hop to hippy shit, so I started to get into those counter cultures pretty fast. I took up skateboarding shortly after and got into everything that surrounds that too, like what I considered underground “not pop” music. I got big into raves later in high school, which was kind of the end days of the Chicago scene.

 

Yeah. All my half siblings were considerably older than me. I grew up as a single child but they exposed me to things on our annual trip to California where my father was from. We’d go see them, and to me, it all seemed really cutting edge. You mentioned Guru earlier. The first time I heard Gang Starr was from my brother. The song “Above The Clouds” blew my mind. I’d come back home, like, “listen to this”.

 

I’d share with the two dudes I hung out with closely. I didn’t come back presenting new styles and ideas to the masses. It was just for me and a few buddies. The first time I smoked weed was out there, and it was really great weed. The first time I smoked weed here, it was like a black Frosted Flake on a stick out of a pop can.

I’ve always rejected that notion. Clearly, with me being here now, right? When I graduated, I watched a lot of people go to the Art Institute Of Chicago and instantly go to New York or whatever and just suffer. I mean they'd have fun and party but they were suffering.

 

I went to Northern Illinois in De Kalb, Home of the Huskies, Cindy Crawford and where they invented barbed wire. Like, nine out of ten students would go to New York or LA, and all of them were broke as shit. I was too, but I could be less broke as shit here. I’ve stayed in my comfort zone, that’s for sure. I always say to people, “Why be some nobody in New York when I can be the fuckin’ King of Warrenville?”

 

Well, I’ve been here my whole life. It’s cheap, and slow, and safe and it’s not so rural that I’m surrounded by extremely antiquated ideas. The ’burbs are super mixed now with massive Middle Eastern, Hispanic and Black populations. We don’t have to just eat hamburgers and hot dogs. It's ideal for me. Nowadays, with Instagram and an occasional flight here and there, you can sustain a creative career anyplace.

 

Regardless of them, I’ve always drawn and think my parents would agree that I took it, at the very least, slightly more seriously than most other kids. I always gravitated towards artistic things. Drawing for a kid is the most accessible. It’s paper and crayon, so way easier to draw than make a film.

Back then, yeah, for sure. Were you an art student at Northern Illinois?
Admittedly, after high school, I had no idea what I wanted to be at eighteen. My parents encouraged me to pursue something artistic. I got it into my head that I should do graphic design because it seemed more of a financially stable future or path than trying to become a rockstar. I enrolled in graphic design and quickly realized I did not like it. I’m not great with computers and was super frustrated with software. Spending a year just studying typography and fonts alone was so fucking boring. All the fine art kids were sexier and seemed to be having more fun. After two years in design, a review came around, and they were like, “Why don’t you just go to fine arts?” They could see me gazing over there, and half the assignments I’d turn in were hand drawn. So I switched my degree over to focus on painting. Four years later, even being a painting student, I maybe made like three paintings. I did make loads of intimate, small scale works on paper because it was cheap and easy. I’d sign up for painting class and spend, like, $300 on all these paints and waste all this material to make one stinking painting. I couldn’t afford to be failing that much. I came from a blue collar family and that factored into where I went to school, so I just went close to home because I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I was aware I could not go to college and still pursue what I wanted to pursue, so I settled on an affordable middle ground. My whole early twenties, my philosophy was “Keep It Affordable” in my artwork and living.

 

I started going to gallery shows in Chicago in the West Loop or Western Exhibitions, which is my current gallery. One group show at Bucket Rider Gallery had these little Eddie Martinez paintings, and Cody Hudson had some text pieces there that said “Fuck Christopher Columbus” which was very appealing to me. There was a Maya Hayuk painting of people packed into hot tubs having a casual, sexy adult evening. It got me excited and got the ball rolling in my head that I wanted to contribute to that world. Going to see those shows toward the end of college got me super into making studio art.

 

Let's talk about raves!

 

There were a few different venues that I would go to regularly. This was, like, in ’99, and the last was, like, 2001. They weren’t proper venues. There was the Windy City Fieldhouse, and the Route 66 Roller Rink was another. Before the rave, they had James Brown roller skate nights where the older crowd would step out dressed to the teeth. Then the weird kids on K would be waiting outside.

 

This kid I went to school with would tell me about them because he would go on the weekends. Seeing the flyers he brought back from the parties totally sucked me in. He gave me a few techno and house mixtapes, and I liked them. When I went to my very first party, I had to piss and the bathroom was in the basement. When I went to find my way down this wobbly, dingey stairwell, I got to the bottom, and it was the Jungle Room. I had never been exposed to jungle music, but I loved hip hop. They were playing the “Jump Up” Jungle track and a ton of people were smoking weed, and I was like, “This is amazing!” Finding jungle, drum and bass and two-step got me obsessed.

 

Totally. I ended up working for one of the rave production teams and what they would do was have a bunch of drugs and have a little team of kids and also their own private security. The kids would sell the drugs and the security would keep an eye out for us, like spot the undercover cops. So, for a brief amount of time, I was an employed drug dealer for a Chicago rave production company. It was awesome.

 

No, this was like the seedy part. I’d go to some big security guy and say, “That dude won’t pay me.” I got into drugs pretty substantially.

 

Ecstasy and K. I’d already dealt weed for supplemental income in high school. The guy who got me into going to raves introduced me to the rave producer. At the same time, he also introduced the notion that since I already illicitly distribute over there, I just needed to be shown the ropes to distribute over here, so yeah.

That’s helpful with security having your back.
Otherwise, I wouldn’t have done it. Any raver probably has a handful of horror stories concerning drugs and drug dealers. I know I do. Nefarious characters naturally come with an unregulated thing like that. Raves were always in terrible neighborhoods. Kids would overdose or people beat the hell out of other people. I’ve always been good about getting close to danger without really getting involved.

I’ve always been drawn to black and white. It’s the simplicity. There is a scale of grays, and that’s that. Color fucks me up. Making color decisions? I could waste time all day trying to find perfect color combinations. It’s like shopping at a mega store with too many choices. Black and white is appealing to me, going back to rave flyers. Like the really good, mostly illegal ones would seem to be on Xerox; shit-kicker, black-and-white flyers. Lots of mixtape art was in black and white too. But also the rubber hose animation style was in black and white. That is the best example.

When I started to get into art, Pixar and all that stuff was taking off. I found those cartoons to be soulless. It’s all computer-generated and it wasn’t as appealing to me. Of course, there is a lot of gritty content in older cartoons that is lost, and a lot of it for good reason; but something about modern cartoons is dry and disinteresting to me. I would imitate a lot of old rubber hose animation but insert personal content, anecdotal shit, experiences, and friends’ stories to make it fun for me. It’s storytelling, but I don’t want the viewer to really know the story. I just want them to be compelled by the images. If anything, I’m doing it to please myself, and hopefully, people will dig it.

 

It’s visually loose and tight at the same time. That style is like the first time people saw shit where the rules of physics and stuff were all thrown out the window. The content that is orchestrated in the cartoon blew my mind so hard. I became completely enamoured by it and the black-and-white high-contrast too. I still think it’s the best shit.

I love that. With old cartoons, the effects they achieve with drawing by hand are wild. You know, like motion. A fight ball to me is so cool. They had to figure out tricks or other devices to communicate that information.

 

Even the very initial ones, they were like, “We gotta hire a huge jazz band to make music along to this because we don’t know how to do shit except make something bounce up and down.” The band would play some bells and whistles so you can tell this person got their bell rung or whatever, like this primitive language developing. It’s awesome.You can see mistakes and stuff. There is something human about it. I definitely do have nostalgia for things that have a trace of the human hand. Digital shit’s great. I appreciate it, but that’s not a human endeavor I want to contribute to. I’d rather keep this style going a while longer.

 

Scenarios. There are things I will not draw, like iPhones. It’s like Donald Trump's face, I just don’t want to see that anymore. Even if I have a good zinger. We don’t need more of that. I draw things I don’t see but want to see more of.

 

Yeah. Like many, I have a perverted side and it’s been very present since eighth grade. You know, in the sense that I’m drawn to debauchery or what’s taboo.

 

Yeah man, I had a briefcase full of boobie mags and stuff. Yeah.

I would swap them. Me and some friends had a stash of them in the forest. It was a currency like fireworks and cigarettes. It’s all still present in my work. Explosives, knives, bad boy shit.

 

Ha! I’m not trying to turn anyone on, I don’t think. That’s the way I am in real life. It comes through in the work. If we hang out a whole evening, I will probably wander to somewhere perverse at some point. It’s on my mind. I’ve always liked it as subject matter. And I find a lot more people respond to sex shit than other things. It’s a universal fucking language.

I gravitate towards others who do it like Namio Harukawa or Tom Of Finland. I was like “Oh, this shit is awesome.” Even old Robert Crumb comics.

 

It depends. The way sexuality is viewed now is drastically different from where it was, in the best way possible, but also I feel sex is more somehow political now. Occasionally, I’ll get political responses to sexual images. Like I’ll make a boner goof and someone will type out a very thoughtful, sternly-worded paragraph, and I’ll be like, “Holy shit, it didn't cross my mind that someone would view it like that.” That’s fine. I learn from that shit.

 

America’s sexual hangups have done noticeable damage to its citizens. My drawings are not just sexual, but also rule breaking, petty crime. That shit has always been attractive to me, a way of finding cheap thrills when I was younger. As-long-as-nobody-gets-hurt kind of stuff. I got obsessed with it. Growing up in the ’80s, you got so encouraged by genuinely bad shit. Like rewatching ’80s movies we saw back then, it was a really weird, different time. To me, in a way, it’s forgivable.

 

Yeah, in a way, because that’s how people were; but I’m glad I can look back and be like, “Oh shit, ’88, that was not so cool.”

 

Yeah, as a maker that’s tough. Sometimes I’ll make an image and a friend or family member will be like, “Are you sure you want to put that out?” 99% of the time, I’m like, yes. And I’ve put stuff out that people have misinterpreted and gotten irked by, which is a drag. I’m always open to speak with these people and learn their perspective and share mine. That’s where you learn things. The stakes get higher and higher socially now with cancel-culture and all that. But I always want to touch on semi-taboo shit to some degree.

 

When people get taken down who I feel shouldn’t get taken down, it feels that way. In my mind, the shit I put out there is never really radical or wrong to me. I think people are intelligent enough to read it and get it, or if one irks you, to step back and look at the collective body of work so you see I’m not coming from a place of hatred or dismissal. I wouldn’t classify the collective work as dirty. Probably 25% or less of the work is sexual or violent. Some of it is just weird and silly. Some of the pictures are naked and some of them are nude, know what I mean? There is a varying spectrum throughout the images and some are just fuckin’ dumb. Others are more thoughtful and sophisticated.

 

If you look through my drawings, it’s not all cartoonish. Cartoons, or patterns, comic book devices, text, they’re all just tools to achieve whatever idea I have in my head that day. You’ll also see a cast of characters reoccur, like a dog, birds, this bald guy. They all serve as facets of my personality. Maybe they represent broader human characteristics or personality types. It depends. They are more fluid and serve different purposes in different scenarios. Birds are so abundant in our lives. After humans, it’s birds, cats and dogs. Right now, I’m drawing from photographs of eagles. I’ve been thinking about eagles a lot lately.

Yeah, it’s eagles making love. It’s a great photo. “How do I make an eagle look like it’s in mid-climax?” It’s such a lowbrow dumb idea but I don’t fucking care. If it’s drawn nicely, that’s perfect for my swing zone.

 

Yes. There are obvious lines to be drawn. Humanity, historically, projects itself onto dogs, cats and birds. It’s a long standing, maybe unintentional, human tradition. Perceiving animals through human lenses. You see it everywhere.

Oh my god. My dad, he teaches vacation bible school for fourth grade. He does this lesson on pursuing what you want to do in life as part of the curriculum, and he always shows some of my work. He was over for dinner a couple weeks ago and said he was going to show a drawing that I just posted. It’s this bird in front of a window, but the shadow that’s cast on the wall is a huge cock. He totally missed it. I was like, “Please don’t show that to your fourth grade bible class.” He’s just a regular dude, but when I was growing up, he would pretend to avert his eyes when there were breasts on the screen and say, “That’s unnecessary. Don’t you guys think that’s unnecessary?” But also he was the source of the first boob magazine I saw, which was stashed somewhere in his belongings.

 

I think I've done a pretty good job at straddling the line where, though I've never been a street artist, I've gotten bunched in with some of those artists. I show with some hype people and work with some pretty mainstay institutions of the fine art world. If I can dip my toes in both and keep making what I make, I’m fine with that.

 

I didn’t have much in the way of instruction on how to do it. I figured it would be helpful, beyond just making work, to be active within the community. Instead of just trying to get people to look at me and support me, maybe if I start supporting people, it will karmically come back to me. And if it doesn’t, that’s ok too. I’d gallery sit but also, from selling weed in college, I had somewhat of a disposable income, so I’d buy work from galleries. That was a quick way to be noticed because I was so young. It put me on the radar of local galleries. That snowballed into organizing shows of art I liked that weren’t coming to Chicago. I’d also go out to San Francisco and bring a bunch of Chicago art to show them. It wasn’t curating. It was more a fun social thing where fifty or a hundred artists have work up and everybody comes. You know, it’s not just the drawing, it’s the people. Being able to do this is also having the opportunity to meet so many really wonderful and amazing people all over the world. That’s just as fun. The whole thing is a practice. It’s never ending.

 

It’s starting to get to me. Hopefully, with this next show in late spring, the planets will align and people can get their shit together. We could have a grand gathering because getting together is so rare now. When we can do that, just the sound of a packed space filled with people and drinking is gonna give me goosebumps.

 

Exactly!