| Marion Lorraine Ranyak | |
| Birth Date: | 1925 1, df=yes |
| Birth Place: | New York City |
| Death Place: | Stamford, Connecticut |
| Nationality: | American |
| Education: | Wheelock College |
| Known For: | Painting |
Marion Lorraine Ranyak (25 January 1925 — 22 August 2018)[1] was an American painter who lived and worked in Rye, New York, and was a founding member of SOHO20.[1]
Born Marion Hannig in New York City, she was the daughter of William A. Hannig and Carolyn Exner Hannig.[1] [2] Her father was a public school principal and later a member of the Board of Examiners (1921–53), an agency in New York City that set personnel standards for administrators and educators.[2] [3] Her mother operated a successful family-owned sand and gravel company.[2] [3] In 1950, Marion Hannig married John A. Ranyak;[4] they divorced in the mid-1970s[5]
In 1946, after an unsatisfactory educational experience at Wheelock College,[1] [3] Marion Ranyak spent six weeks in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she studied with the painter Hans Hofmann.[5] The result, she said, was a "very strong feeling of the two-dimensionality of the surface" which was "always there" in her paintings.[5] Ranyak also began to travel—to California, France, and eventually Italy.[3] While her husband was enrolled at MIT and she was raising their three children, Ranyak had little time to paint; she ceased for 14 years but resumed work in 1962.[3] Reading Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, as she later noted, "gave me a support that I got nowhere else in my life."[3] Ranyak identified as a feminist and supported many liberal causes.[1]
Ranyak was a founding member of SOHO20 (est. 1973), the second all-women, artist-run art gallery in New York City.[6] [7] At SOHO20, she initially exhibited painted geometric abstractions[8] and cement "sandcastings,"[9] but an interest in photography led her to explore more realistic views of nature.[3] Her small paintings of pebbles, stones, rocks, grass, and leaves—exhibited at SOHO20 in 1978—emphasize flatness through simplified but precise forms.[8] Ranyak's acrylic paintings were positively reviewed in The New York Times by Vivian Raynor,[10] who described her landscapes as "modest" but with "an air of authority."[11] Raynor later wrote that Ranyak "makes Neil Welliver look like an Expressionist."[12] Ranyak was praised by another critic for her ability to suggest texture while using flatly applied acrylic paint,[13] as in Nova Scotia—Grassy Slope (1985).[14] Her later paintings of fields in upstate New York were well received by Michael Brenson, who wrote, "She touches the canvas as delicately as a bird … The light in her paintings is always at that point of gray heat that sets everything in a landscape in motion."[15]
Ranyak remained a full member of SOHO20 until 1988 and continued as an associate member until 1995.[5] In later years, she lost interest in the urban art scene and exhibited primarily in Westchester County, New York.[5] She died on 22 August 2018, in Stamford, Connecticut)