Ran Ortner, a painter with a passion for surfing, lives and works in Brooklyn. He is inspired by water. “Water is my muse,” says Ortner who has been depicting realistic paintings of waves for decades. Ortner’s fascination with waves stems from their compelling duality: total brutality and delicateness, transparency and darkness. Ortner’s love relationship with the ocean gives us an intimate look at the water. Up close and personal with a total immersion into the environment, Ortner manages to flood us with every stroke of wave through every angle of our vision on the canvas. He has changed our traditional view of seascape, from the spectator’s view to a participant with the subject. It’s the most real and stunning. Ortner’s work “Open Water No 24” won the ArtPrize competition in 2009. In 1966, at the age of five, Ran Ortner moved from San Francisco to rural Alaska. He and his family lived in an isolated log cabin, with no running water, a wood fire for heat and a grass airstrip for a driveway. To escape the brutal winters, Ran and his family would take their single engine Cessna “Ragwing” on 3-4 month adventures from Alaska to South America. On these expeditions, Ran would turn to the open expanse of the sea to escape the confines of his unconventional childhood. Ran Ortner was born in 1959 in San Francisco. Ran Ortner’s back- ground as a professional motorcycle racer influenced his interest in art. Drawn to the physicality and energy of motorcycle racing Ortner later transferred this dynamism into his approach to painting. He studied art privately in Canada and the United Kingdom. His conceptual sculptures and his paintings have been exhibited in Washington, North Carolina, California, New York, Belgium and Germany. Ran was also a lecturer at the Hoger Instituut voor Schone Kunsten in Belgium. In 2008 and 2009 his work was in a traveling exhibition, “Falling Short of Knowing” which opened in New York and traveled to Singapore. undefined

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