Words by Melissa Williams

Deep within the darkness of the swamps beyond, splashing in murky pools, crawling through muddy banks and bouncing from tree to tree. In the unseen distance, there are creatures breeding, growing, floating, leeching and sniggering.

Chris Ryniak brings these little monsters to life exquisitely. Big brother to the adorable and defender of the natural, Ryniak is a fine artist and sculptor who perfectly blends fantasy and the unknown with fun-filled personality. He transforms the natural world into shapes and colours that communicates to the soul of mankind.

Ryniak grew up in the suburb of Detroit, Michigan a small town that had everything you could ever need with out having to leave its very condensed borders. Ryniak’s father was an avid fisherman and would often take the family fishing or out to some magnificent natural spaces. Ryniak would spend the bulk of his summers at his parents' cottage, which was essentially a shack with no running water. The cottage was on an island that you had to take a car ferry to. The island was mostly marshland with a great abundance and variation of wildlife. Ryniak also spent a lot of his time in his parents’ offset printing shop, which they still run today. Growing up in a print shop meant that he was never without a major supply of different kinds of paper and mark-making implements. ‘Between the graphically charged environment of the print shop and the constant visual and tactile stimulus of spending most of my childhood knee-deep in mud looking for reptiles and amphibians, my brain was fully-primed to create strangeness of one kind or another.’

Ryniak drew all the time as a kid, especially when he was supposed to be doing schoolwork. He would draw in all of his schoolbooks, on the walls, magazine covers, anything. He was a true space-filling, blank-page terminator. Ryniak still has full sketchbooks from when he was ten years old: ‘Most of the things I drew when I was younger are just less refined versions of what I am doing now; creatures that may or may not be rooted in reality.’

Since Ryniak was a child, he always wanted to do something creative with his life. From an early age he was inspired by a myriad of movies and the monsters in them. Ryniak had a strong interest in animation, as most kids do, but it wasn't until he was an early teen that he got into skateboarding and saw that some of the pro riders were young guys that rode and did the graphics for all of their decks. This became a real driving force for Ryniak’s art well through high school.

The FULL interview with CHRIS RYNIAK appears in issue 4 of Mynameis? magazine - click here to purchase your copy www.graphotism.com/Subscribe-Graphotism-or-MyNameIs-Magazine.74.0.html