The Art of Mark Ryden

Mark Ryden’s art has been described as intriguing and unsettling, baffling and enchanting, disturbing, mystical, cuddly and creepy all at once. Ryden has been called the king of the Pop Surrealism movement. Combining happy child-like images with disturbing pieces of body parts or strange sights in nature, creating a peculiar mixture of children's book images and meat or blood. Inspired by alchemy, metaphysics, science, and philosophy and attracted to ancient cryptic symbols and mystical imagery, Mark Ryden creates fantastic storybook artworks which are beautiful yet disturbing.

Ryden's work combines saccharine-sweet, cartoon-like characters with a detailed fullness and a creepy combination of numerology, little girls, meat, Catholic and Buddhist symbolism, and carnivalesque Americana. Attracted to things that evoke memories from childhood, Mark Ryden often incorporates toys, as well as scenes of bunnies, children, clowns, and ice cream vans they just happen to be combined with skulls and porterhouse steaks.

Ranging from large highly-polished oil paintings to small black-and-white works on paper, Mark Ryden burst onto the art scene in the 1990s as both pop art illustrator and fine art painter. His art has gained greater popularity thanks to publications such as Juxtapoz, which features his art regularly, and to his work on many album covers including Michael Jackson’s “Dangerous,” Red Hot Chili Peppers “One Hot Minute,” Scarling’s “Sweet Heart Dealer” as well as covers for Ringo Starr and Jack Off Jill. His Ryden’s artwork is also on the dustjack of Stephen King’s novels “Desperation” and “The Regulators.”

Many new people became fans after Chris Garver did a reproduction of Ryden’s print “Rose” on Miami Ink and his artwork is now highly coveted for tattoos. However, it takes a highly gifted artist to be able to recreate his unique masterpieces.

“Rose”, a gothic girl crying tears of blood is the most popular of his works to be translated to skin, though many others have also made the leap including “Fountain,” a painting of a girl holding her head while blood shoots from her neck, “Nurse Sue,” and “Dog Named Jesus.”

“I find it so much easier to be creatively free at night. Daytime is for sleeping. Nighttime is the best time for making art. The later at night it gets the further into another world you go." - Mark Ryden