Ronan Boyle was born in Derry, Ireland and then moved to Canada as a child in 1974, Ronan spent his childhood under the sudo tutelage of DJ Michael Gulf and through him was introduced to the music, arts and culture of the early eighties in New York including Basquiat, Hearing, Pettibone and Warhol.

Although Boyle is primarily a self-taught artist, he has extensive training in the rare finishing techniques of European decorative art. The influence of this highly technical approach to surface and materials can be seen in much of Boyle's abstract work, in which he builds a kind of topography into the texture of each painting.