Ruary Allen | TRAVELLING TEMPLE OF THE ARTS
Ruary Allan is originally from Edinburgh, Scotland where he talked to “invisible” friends and rode small dinosaurs. From an early age he listened to Mike Oldfield and prog rock so much that he almost forgot puberty. He spent an entire summer on an exchange trip to Middle Earth and then got into Dungeons and Dragons which was really cool cause they had all the Platonic solids for dice. He also joined The Boy Scouts, a secret society founded to see how much blood could be removed from the bodies of children by midges. Ruary received an education, apparently, as the University of St. Andrews awarded him a degree in geology, much to his surprise. This led to a year mud-logging on North Sea oil rigs, which evoked for him gigantic mosquitoes, draining the very blood of the Earth.
For much of the 90s he lived Oakland (Oaksterdam), California where he got radical, went to Burning Man a lot and continued working with dirt and pollution. He also brought oil paint into his mix of materials, enjoying publication of his art and some good shows with some notable artists. After a spell living in a cookie factory prone to very large parties, there was five quasi-exotic years in Tokyo, one rather bad one in Barcelona and extensive adventure travel on the cheap before he came back to UK (or Blighty as he still likes to call it) in 2013. He found a relatively soft landing in Glastonbury (the town not the festival) which is not more strange than anywhere else he’s been.
Inspired by nature and psychedelic culture, Ruary has been inexorably drawn to express his inner vision. He didn’t know he could do it. His visual pilgrimage focuses on the use of colour, chaos and spatiality to recreate worlds of the imagination, symbolic mindscapes mediated by free association. His work has appeared in various galleries and juried art festivals in the US, Japan, Thailand and Europe, on CD covers, in alternative magazines and on too many party flyers to count. Ruary is currently represented by Heart of the Tribe Gallery in Glastonbury.
heartofthetribe.com
