In one popular poster developed by Ryan Myers, you first notice the bold colors of the Galaxy Diner storefront in Carytown. The colors draw you in and, when you look closer, that’s when you notice a distinctly alien-looking customer making their order at the bar.
That subtle joke is only one of many artistic modes that Myers operates in. Another is more wryly sarcastic, like the view of the Carillon that is subtitled, “Richmond’s Most Inconvenient Musical Instrument.”
Then there are examples of more in-your-face humor, like the demon-red poster titled “The West End: Sacrifice Your Soul and Give Up Your Dreams.”
In the hundreds of such prints he’s created, Myers captures iconic landscapes, local lore and the most insidery of in-jokes. While the scenes he depicts often include humor, they are also simply and stunningly beautiful and always reflective of something uniquely Richmond.
“There is an endless well of in-jokes in Richmond,” says Myers. “It’s kind of my goal to cover everything in existence here, joke-wise, building-wise, lore-wise.”
Myers has always had a creative bent, drawing elaborate mazes when he was a toddler and experimenting with digital printmaking when he was young. Even so, it was almost by accident that he ended up with a burgeoning art business.
After dropping out of college, Myers was doing various odd jobs, including some freelance ad design. “After losing my last semi-normal job in the summer of 2019, I had enough money for a few months of rent,” he says. He was helping his partner at a maker’s market event when inspiration struck.
“I saw some vendors selling a lot of extremely basic Richmond merch,” Myers remembers. “I didn’t have another job lined up so I had nothing but time. I bought a large-format design printer to print posters, and just started printing ideas I had all day and night.”
He had more than 50 prints done within a couple of weeks and started hitting art market events. His third was a holiday event at Hardywood Brewing. “I made more money that day than I would have made in multiple months at previous jobs,” he says. “I had finally found a creative outlet that I could actually make a living off of. I immediately decided to make it my full-time job”
The pandemic ended up being a very mixed experience for Myers. He contracted COVID early on which turned into long COVID. “It was and is horrible,” he says. “But to get my mind off of it, I went back into production overdrive.”
He started posting on Instagram every day and his number of fans jumped up; he currently has more than 10,000 followers, many who have bought his prints online. “Making people laugh on the internet during a miserable time really helped me emotionally,” Myers says. “And people seemed to get what I was going for.”
Several of his ideas have gone semi-viral including a rendering of Francine, the cat that wanders the Lowe’s hardware store on Broad Street, blown up to huge proportions and curled up in a ball on Marcus-David Circle on Monument Avenue. The subtitle is “Lowe’s hardest working employee.”
Though some of his jokes seem tossed off, Myers toils away at some ideas for years. “I have one of Plan 9 Records that, at the bottom, has all of these fake musical genres,” he says. “I’ve been tweaking it for so long that some of the non-genres are already obsolete.”
Though the artistry of his prints is undeniable, Myers still feels uncomfortable with the artist label. “I’m more of a graphic designer first,” he says. “In my mind, it’s different when someone starts as an illustrator with an innate drawing ability. For me, the work really comes from manipulating the software, being able to tweak things endlessly and combining different approaches into one image.”
Myers has become increasingly fascinated with creating neo-noir images featuring dramatic lighting effects. “I love doing nighttime ones the most because I like the juxtaposition of darkness and neon light,” he says.
But he also knows his audience. “Some people only like my more scenic or satirical designs,” he says. “Older people go for the nature or travel poster ones; younger people go for the ones that fuel morbid nightmares, the giant rats and cats.”
Because of his focus on very specific elements of Richmond, he often ends up educating people about their own city. “I have a print showing the Lakeside scissors,” Myers says. “I was doing an event across the street from where the scissors are and I had so many people ask me, what is this?
“I’d tell them just look out the window and they’d be like, ‘Oh, I’ve never seen that before.’”
Ryan Myers Prints maintains an online store at https://www.ryanmyersprints.com and Myers regularly appears at the Richmond Makers Market the first Saturday of each month.
