Comment on Georgia Ryan's Study

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A Comment on Georgia Ryan's "After the Party."

Today, starting it off, I'm extremely proud to present an original watercolor/mixed media creation with a strong sobriety theme. I've titled the piece "After The Party." It's a self-portrait of one of those moments we've all had, perhaps many a time, when we've glanced into the bathroom mirror between retches. The artist is Georgia "Bing" Ryan, a young contemporary San Franciscan painter who lives and paints in a big Victorian apartment filled with sunlight and canvases. The picture dates from 1985. It's a well-executed study of herself in party clothes and vivid makeup, contrasting with the pallor of her face when feeling extremely sick.

There's a phenomenon called "euphoric recall" by which the memory edits out the bad things about the past and remembers mostly the good. Applied to our drinking and drugging lives, euphoric recall can be the tool of denial and the lubricant for relapse. One of the basic tools of sobriety is to "call up" the bad things about our drinking/drugging lives, to "play the tape all the way through." See, for example, Jim Christopher's Triumph! workshop; Larry B.'s Sobriety Toolkit. Artist Ryan has used her paintbrushes to construct this vivid personal "calling up exercise."

The painterly technique here is restrained and realistic. Ryan has tried to tell it like it was; she is neither striving for cheap shocks -- you don't see any stuff coming out of her gaping mouth -- nor is she minimizing the ugliness of the moment. This is quality work. The museum directors probably won't be fighting to get this item, but for us in sobriety this can be more valuable than the Mona Lisa.

How I came across this little gem is another whole story which I'll let the artist's sister tell. The sister of the artist is none other than "Cindy in Maine" of the SOS email list.

Georgia Ryan has a major canvas in preparation along similar lines. It shows a drinker crawling on the floor to hang his head in the toilet. She's promised to let me photograph it when it's done, and I'll post it on the web site at the earliest opportunity. I'd love to have a whole cyber-museum of artwork and photos along this vein. I'd call it the Morning-After Museum or the Calling-Up Gallery. Any leads and contributions will be appreciated.

My thanks to Craig M. for his work in scanning, cropping and enhancing the photograph using his Umax flatbed scanner and Adobe Photoshop. -- Marty N. 7/12/97.

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