Eleanor Ryan
ARTIST & GRAPHIC DESIGNEREleanor Ryan is an interdisciplinary graphic designer and artist with a focus on ecology and
urban land use. In their professional work, they focus on using approachable graphic forms and
storytelling to give the public an understanding of urban planning and landscape design. By
creating design systems, they build site-specific brand identities for landscape projects in order
to connect the local community to the design and construction process of the land around them.
In their personal work, Ryan dives deeper into a surreal representation of experiencing
ecological interconnectedness. They value systems of reciprocity and attempt to represent them
through diagram and drawing alike. Through the depiction of a symbiotic web, their work toys
with forms meant to evoke layers of connection. Most of their recent work has been oil pastel,
acrylic painting, and wax crayon.
DEC 30, 2025
Eleanor Ryan sees joy and meander as central to their work. "I think about art a bit as the antithesis to efficiency," they explain. The New York-based designer and artist balances professional graphic design work—focused on making urban planning and landscape design legible to the public—with personal paintings and drawings that explore ecological interconnectedness through gesture and color. Working primarily in oil pastel, acrylic, and wax crayon, Ryan creates layered compositions where green dominates, evoking the reciprocal systems of nature.
There's a gestural quality in your mark-making. How do you create texture across various scales, materials, or surfaces?
Texture very directly comes from the jerking, even dancing motion that my hand wants to make as I bring it to a page. Sometimes I don’t even look as I make my first mark of a drawing. Depending on the medium I have in hand, the dancing can be a tiptoe, sneaking through the page, expanding, inching into the shape of a form I often don’t know before it appears before me. With a heftier paint brush in hand, the gestures may take on a much bolder exploration of greater areas of colors at once, rather than a slow build up of value.
Once a layer of this sporadic motion builds into a compositional wireframe, a second iteration follows, fitting into the incidental negative space. This stage of drawing is more about zooming in and stepping out; spending time looking and reacting rather than moving and marking. It’s easy to think of it as moss growing on and around the rocks I have scattered. The field growing up and through. The grasses shifting in the wind.
How do you decide your color scheme when creating a piece?
Color imbues life into a piece, makes it an organism. My work fits into a very specific gamut of color, with green being the central grounding identity. A warm, earthy, transparent green undeniably dominates my use of color. I like to describe it as the color of a leaf as the sun shines through it from above. Around the green, yellows, reds, oranges, and especially browns, can come in to balance it. They combine in the ratios of an ecosystem, working to feed on one another. Nothing satisfies me quite like a swath of green fading rapidly into a sharp red edge.
Green appears throughout your work and seems to have become part of your signature identity. What's your relationship with this color?
Green came to me in the year we were all inside, when nature was the only responsible escape. My art practice filled the edges of my days, giving me a comfort away from online classes and familial responsibilities. At the time, my drawings leaned consistently into abstracting the natural landscape into gestural forms and texture,s building up on a page. By draping them in green, I grew the environment I wanted to be living in rather than the white walls of my bedroom. The more green works I created, the more of a forest my room could become.
As a graphic designer and artist, how does your practice differ when working with other clients from your personal project?
Personal projects are about joy, and client projects are about money. It is sometimes as simple as that. But to think about it more procedurally, client projects call for a far more intentional order of operations; teasing out the wants of the art and the needs of the client. The purpose of graphic design is to package information in a way that gives it the speed and flavor that the author wants for their reader. Therefore, with a client, I must take carefully directed steps towards the final product. With personal work, the steps meander, and the final product often has little to do with direct communication.
Many of your works invite playful interaction, whether physical or digital. How do you think about the audience's role in experiencing your work?
I see joy and meander as central tenets to my work. I think about art a bit as the antithesis to efficiency. When an audience experiences art, they slow to a stop and rest in the suspended reality of a piece. I don’t think this applies to the professional graphic design work that I do, as that often has legibility and therefore efficiency as a core need. When creating a composition geared towards nothing but the joy of fine art, I want the audience to feel permission to detach from the speed needs of every day life. I want them to feel immersed and fascinated, a sweet distraction or at least a hazy lens.
What directions are you most excited to explore in your artist path and practice right now?
I cannot wait to produce a substantial quantity of paintings and drawings. I firmly believe that to overcome the slow pursuit of quality, I need to invest in quantity. Every new work is an opportunity to stumble into new ways of making and learn new ways of visual pleasure. Too many ideas exist in my head as vague understandings of what would satisfy me on paper. Additionally, ecological research has been a firm sibling to my design work in the past few years. I want to pull that into my painting practice in a way that grounds my landscapes in a meaningful context. I want the forms of my paintings to carry specific ecological meaning and site specificity.
There's a gestural quality in your mark-making. How do you create texture across various scales, materials, or surfaces?
Texture very directly comes from the jerking, even dancing motion that my hand wants to make as I bring it to a page. Sometimes I don’t even look as I make my first mark of a drawing. Depending on the medium I have in hand, the dancing can be a tiptoe, sneaking through the page, expanding, inching into the shape of a form I often don’t know before it appears before me. With a heftier paint brush in hand, the gestures may take on a much bolder exploration of greater areas of colors at once, rather than a slow build up of value.
Once a layer of this sporadic motion builds into a compositional wireframe, a second iteration follows, fitting into the incidental negative space. This stage of drawing is more about zooming in and stepping out; spending time looking and reacting rather than moving and marking. It’s easy to think of it as moss growing on and around the rocks I have scattered. The field growing up and through. The grasses shifting in the wind.
How do you decide your color scheme when creating a piece?
Color imbues life into a piece, makes it an organism. My work fits into a very specific gamut of color, with green being the central grounding identity. A warm, earthy, transparent green undeniably dominates my use of color. I like to describe it as the color of a leaf as the sun shines through it from above. Around the green, yellows, reds, oranges, and especially browns, can come in to balance it. They combine in the ratios of an ecosystem, working to feed on one another. Nothing satisfies me quite like a swath of green fading rapidly into a sharp red edge.
Green appears throughout your work and seems to have become part of your signature identity. What's your relationship with this color?
Green came to me in the year we were all inside, when nature was the only responsible escape. My art practice filled the edges of my days, giving me a comfort away from online classes and familial responsibilities. At the time, my drawings leaned consistently into abstracting the natural landscape into gestural forms and texture,s building up on a page. By draping them in green, I grew the environment I wanted to be living in rather than the white walls of my bedroom. The more green works I created, the more of a forest my room could become.
As a graphic designer and artist, how does your practice differ when working with other clients from your personal project?
Personal projects are about joy, and client projects are about money. It is sometimes as simple as that. But to think about it more procedurally, client projects call for a far more intentional order of operations; teasing out the wants of the art and the needs of the client. The purpose of graphic design is to package information in a way that gives it the speed and flavor that the author wants for their reader. Therefore, with a client, I must take carefully directed steps towards the final product. With personal work, the steps meander, and the final product often has little to do with direct communication.
Many of your works invite playful interaction, whether physical or digital. How do you think about the audience's role in experiencing your work?
I see joy and meander as central tenets to my work. I think about art a bit as the antithesis to efficiency. When an audience experiences art, they slow to a stop and rest in the suspended reality of a piece. I don’t think this applies to the professional graphic design work that I do, as that often has legibility and therefore efficiency as a core need. When creating a composition geared towards nothing but the joy of fine art, I want the audience to feel permission to detach from the speed needs of every day life. I want them to feel immersed and fascinated, a sweet distraction or at least a hazy lens.
What directions are you most excited to explore in your artist path and practice right now?
I cannot wait to produce a substantial quantity of paintings and drawings. I firmly believe that to overcome the slow pursuit of quality, I need to invest in quantity. Every new work is an opportunity to stumble into new ways of making and learn new ways of visual pleasure. Too many ideas exist in my head as vague understandings of what would satisfy me on paper. Additionally, ecological research has been a firm sibling to my design work in the past few years. I want to pull that into my painting practice in a way that grounds my landscapes in a meaningful context. I want the forms of my paintings to carry specific ecological meaning and site specificity.