A PAINTER WHO OPENED HIS OWN GALLERY QUICKLY HITS THE BIG TIME

by Edward M. Gómez

It’s not every day that a quote from Aldo Leopold (1887–1948), the American naturalist, forester, ecologist, conservationist, and educator, inspires someone to open an art gallery, but in the early autumn of 2022, as the world was emerging from the coronavirus pandemic, that’s just the impact one of his observations had on the artist Ryan Ward.

Leopold had written, “The autumn landscape in the north woods is the land, plus a red maple, plus a ruffed grouse. In terms of conventional physics, the grouse represents only a millionth of either the mass or the energy of an acre, yet subtract the grouse, and the whole thing is dead.”