“The Natural”: Part 2 of the Ryan Henry Ward Interview by Xavier Lopez

 When I come up on Ryan Henry Ward he is standing outside of a local bar in Georgetown, wearing a full beard and a hearty laugh. Ryan Henry Ward is a burly bear of a chap, looking part mad mountain man, part insane artist. Despite being a bit tired from having just put the finishing touches on a group show, doing a stint of live painting in front of an audience (alongside fellow artists Brandon “Narboo” Baker, David “starheadboy” Bloomfield, Xavier (me) Lopez Jr. and Andrew Miller–who, together make up the group Predators of the Wild–a team who paint live, do group shows and murals with Ryan) accompanied by a live band and having worked on several murals, “Henry” as he has come to be known because of the huge signatures proudly emblazoned on the over 80 murals he has lovingly created all over Seattle in the last three years, is obviously a friendly, almost gentle young man, full of stories, bravado and always wearing a mischievous grin. I have known Ryan for several years, shown with him in more than a few locations and even I am sometimes surprised by how driven and smart he is while at the same time being amazingly gracious. And as he says later on in our interview together about something completely different, it all comes “natural” to him.

Xavier: So how have you been doing?

Ryan Henry Ward: I don’t know. I kind of get little bouts of downtime after big events.

Xavier: You mean like depression?

Ryan Henry Ward: It’s not really depression, I just feel kind of worn out–you know? During the big push for a show, I kind of give it everything and afterwards, I don’t want to do anything. Just sit on the couch and watch movies. But it doesn’t take long for me to snap back and want to make more art–you know. But you have to have the down time to balance everything or whatever.

Xavier: Well, you definitely are a busy boy, especially these days!

Ryan Henry Ward: I am a busy boy! And Seattle is a great city to be an artist in. People really like art here. I think people in Seattle get really turned on by it. I think that if I were an artist anywhere else, I wouldn’t be as happy–it just feels as though people here really appreciate what we do, you know? People here actually get excited about their artists.

Xavier: That’s true, more and more people stop you on the street just to tell you how much they love your work!

Ryan Henry Ward: That’s true and it’s happening more and more and not just in Ballard, but all over Seattle. It used to be isolated to Ballard and Fremont where I got started and just yesterday I got four shout-outs in West Seattle. It’s all really amazing to me, these are really good times to be an artist!

Xavier: I would like to focus a bit on your history and get a sense of where you come from. Take me back to the beginning: who is Ryan Henry Ward?

Ryan Henry Ward: I think that the answer to that really, is that basically, I’m an artist. I approach the world and see the world as an artist. The way that I see everything, everyday is constantly from an artist’s perspective. Everything affects my work, everything I see, everyone I talk to, every interaction, everywhere I go, it is as an artist.

The world is very visual to me and I see it broken up into visual values and it constantly morphs and changes. I could be sitting in a bar and see a chair and I automatically imagine what it would be like if I painted it or if someone else were to render it. I imagine how it might translate into an art piece or what I could do creatively with it. I am constantly inspired by the world around me. Everything is downloaded into my unconscious. Like I will notice the angle of someone’s eyes or a beautiful sky and it all becomes part of my work. It’s a constant dance with the universe. It’s really my job to be a creator of images. I take a two-dimensional plane, primarily and attempt to make it into a three-dimensional world!

Xavier: Take us back even a bit further, to the things that were important when you were just starting out.

Ryan Henry Ward: I guess the moment where I actually started was the moment when I realized that this was something I wanted to do professionally and that was in the middle of the four-wheel accident that nearly took my life, and which nearly broke my back (something, which Ryan lives and struggles with every day
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Xavier: Could you describe this moment, which one would have imagined could have happened while you where you in bed, gazing at the stars or looking at a Van Gogh…?

Ryan Henry Ward: Uh, actually, I was lying on the ground, underneath a four-wheeler being squished to death. At the time I had owned a landscaping company that was really successful. Me and my brother owned it and we were making hand-over-fist dollars and I bought a thirteen-thousand-dollar four-wheeler. I went into a brand-new motorcycle dealership and asked for their biggest and baddest–and got it! And that was a Polaris 800, which is a huge bike! 900 lbs! Very powerful. Very fast. Very fun. My brother had one and so did many of my friends and it was a way to be social. I got one and I’m kind of an adrenaline junkie–so I definitely got into it. We went out to Moses Lake–where the sand dunes are, into a sanctioned motorcycle area. We rode all day, camped out and rode the next day. But that night I had been doing a little too much drinking and I decided to go for a ride with my brother and his friends. They were a lot faster, because they had these little racing sport bikes and I couldn’t go around corners as fast as they could. I was behind them and they all went off this ten-foot cliff and kept riding. I went off of it too…

Ryan Henry Ward: I flew off the front of my four-wheeler and landed on the sand down below and the four-wheeler landed on top of me. The whole thing landed on my head. The bar landed on my helmet and whiplashed my spine, f***-ed my back up and I was trapped underneath this four-wheeler. I was stuck there for at least a half-hour and it was actually squishing me to death. Everyone else was far ahead of me and had no idea that this had happened.

I was at the very last seconds of my life and my life actually flashed before my eyes. I think I was taking my last breath in and literally it was this cosmic moment for me where I saw the humor of the universe. And I was struck by the irony of how I was dying under this d***ed four-wheeler. It seemed bizarre that everything I had resisted my whole life was now killing me. I thought that was funny. I remember getting in one last chuckle and then this sixteen-year old kid jumped out of his Toyota pick-up and threw this thing off of me at the last second. It was like a millisecond thing that saved my life.

Xavier: So basically, the moment that started your art career also started a situation that has actually made your mural-painting at times an almost excruciating experience!

Ryan Henry Ward: Absolutely! It completely messed up my back. I took a year off, which I basically spent in bed, healing. It was also a year of formulation for me, where I had amnesia most of the time and did weird art projects. Like, I would go down to the beach and paint two rocks as eye-balls and find strange places to stick them and photograph them! I was pretty out there! When I moved to Mercer Island, I began to feel more like myself and I decided that I was going to do this one-hundred percent.

Xavier: So had you been painting before this?

Ryan Henry Ward: I’d been painting since I was sixteen, on and off, doing different shows at coffee shops in Bellingham and lots of graffiti and street art–mostly canvas painting and some sculpture. But back to the accident for a moment, it changed this from being just something that I did to being who I am. But before that art had always been a part of my life. When I was a teenager, my guidance counselor asked me what I wanted to do for a career and at that time I wanted to be a Playboy cartoonist. And I was actively working toward this goal constantly. As a teenager I did a lot of pornographic cartooning and this freaked my mom out. One day she went through my drawers in my room when I wasn’t there and she found my porno cartoons. Let’s just say that it became an “issue” that I was doing this. When I was a child, I wanted to be a Sunday morning cartoonist and this just seemed like a natural progression.

I have been a compulsive artist since I was three years old and could pick up a crayon and leave a mark on paper. There hasn’t been a period in my life when I wasn’t doing art. Even if it was just taking the phone book and using the pages to draw doodles. I was the doodler; everything had my drawings on it around the house, napkins, curtains, the walls, my parent’s mail. In third grade my spelling tests would always have four or five drawings on them. They’d ask, “How do you spell ‘dinosaur,'” and I would spell it then draw a dinosaur or a witch and I would draw on my desks–a lot. For me, art has a very deep history to it. Me drawing, me making art is something that has been in motion since I came out of the womb. It is basically who I am, it’s not something that I have to try to be. It’s actually the easiest thing in the world for me to do. It’s the one thing that when I do do it–it just feels like I was meant to be doing it. It’s natural.

There have been times when it’s been a struggle. But there was only one time in which it was f***ing scary for me, but we will get to that. But it’s always been there. I don’t know how to say it in a cool sounding way, but I’ve always just been doing it!

Xavier: So let’s go back to the period after the accident when things took a change for you.

Ryan Henry Ward: So, when I decided to take this seriously, I decided to paint ten canvases, photograph them, put a portfolio together, go around town and find places to put my work in Seattle. So I was going around, not expecting to put my work up in a gallery, because I didn’t think I was gallery material. But then I walked into the Orange Splot Gallery and I was like, “What the heck! I’ll try this gallery, it looks cool. I shuffled in, checked out the art and I just walked out. Then I went around the block and said to myself, “I’m going to f***in’ do it!” Then I walked in and showed him my portfolio, which was just ten 4×6 photographs and gave him my contact information.

Ryan Henry Ward: He called me like a week later and offered me a show. I was completely tripped out! I couldn’t believe it. Oh my God, I thought–I’m getting into a gallery and it’s even a cool one!

Xavier: The Orange Splot was an awesome place and Kevin McKouen put together an almost mythical balance of cool urban, Pop and just plain exciting work. If you were one of the lucky few to have actually experienced it, then you experienced the awesome magic that happened there. Several young artists in Seattle got their start there–Kevin definitely had a keen eye for artists in Seattle.

Ryan Henry Ward: Definitely! I was just overwhelmingly excited and so I invited everybody in the world to the first show and the second one I didn’t invite anybody. And the second month was actually Xavier’s first month there and I didn’t have hardly anybody look at my stuff. There was like 250 people in there and I remember specifically one person looking at my stuff.

Xavier: Yeah, right, that very kind of you to say, but, actually I have pictures and Lee from the City Hostel was there and he definitely took a liking to your work!

Ryan Henry Ward: He did. The next month he bought a piece and asked me to show it in his Hostel. In fact the second place I showed was at his place and they stayed up for a year while international visitors from everywhere got a chance to see my work. A few months later I was painting murals, I think June of 2008 was when I started painting murals in Seattle.

Xavier: Where was your first Seattle mural?

Ryan Henry Ward: It was outside of the front door of the Orange Splot Gallery. It was the day before Summer Solstice that I painted it and I was so excited and I had this weird sense that after I finished my first mural I would be famous!

Xavier: Nice!

Ryan Henry Ward: And I was actually kind of shocked that I wasn’t! And the second mural I painted was the Unicorn and the Dog on Leary and it was really strange that while painting it no one saw me. No one saw me paint it. No one peeked their head out of the window of their car as they passed by. It was in a very obvious spot. Someone was painting a giant picture, but no one looked! It seemed at the time like no one saw it and it took a long time for people to begin to notice it. And it shocked me because I was painting this huge-a**, crazy painting of a unicorn and nobody reacted. But almost immediately afterward, My-Ballard.com did an article on me when I started the third mural, which was under the Fifteenth Street Bridge.

Xavier: This is just two months after you have started showing in Seattle?

Ryan Henry Ward: Yeah, this is August and the press has started noticing what I was doing. Then the Ballard Tribune did a piece on me, and they interviewed me and I thought again, cool! And I couldn’t sleep the night before. And it was on the back page and I was shocked that I wasn’t on the front page of the paper, because I had done three murals!

But it just started growing and growing from there! The press was kind of there the whole way. The more I did, the more they wrote and the more they wrote, the more I did. It just got to be really fun and I slowly realized that I just have to work really hard to get recognition!

Then the word got out that I was doing free murals around town and people were calling me. My first 26 murals were absolutely free. I think I did my third one in August and then I had 26 done by October of that same year! So there was like a month and a half where I just cranked this sh*t out! I was doing a mural every other day!

Xavier: So far in our story, things are going pretty well for you. You are constantly moving up and things seem to be getting better and better for you. You’re being interviewed by a slew of newspapers! You’ve got murals everywhere! King 5 did a story on you! You’re selling canvases regularly! This is just a really good time for you.

Ryan Henry Ward: Then September comes and I did my first paid mural. I remember it exactly, and I only did a couple of paid murals before my catastrophe. And the first paid gig was the school on Capitol Hill.

Xavier: This is an awesome story!

Ryan Henry Ward: So people were calling me for murals, and I was wandering around with this intense vision in my head. It was like when I was a kid and I used to be a skateboarder and everything was something I could skateboard on! Like, “Oh! The cement’s curved right there, I could bust my skateboard out and use that as a ramp, or that handrail.” Everything in the world looked like something I could use my skateboard with.

Xavier: The whole world became a Tootsie Roll!

Ryan Henry Ward: Exactly! The whole world became a Tootsie Roll! When I started to do murals, I would drive around looking for places to put murals, and it would trip me out doing them because I would paint some big mural out in the SODO district on a hot sunny day in June with my buddy Wes and I would realize that I was painting something that is going to become an iconic image for this city!

Xavier: That’s very true! I’ve even heard of people who currently do their own self-guided “Henry” tours of the city!

Ryan Henry Ward: As we do this interview I’m halfway through my 80th mural, and that includes my indoor murals like the Hostel and grade schools, which I also consider to be public murals. It’s great that people support it and people love it! It’s cool!

Xavier: But things weren’t necessarily all sunshine, am I right?

Ryan Henry Ward: Right! At the same time, I’m going through this whole, like, weird process that is kind of tripping me out. To a certain extent I didn’t know how to deal with the changes that were happening at this time. I didn’t know what this all meant or how big it was, but I was getting kind of confused at that point, too. At this point, I’m putting out these huge images and people seem to love them. But at the same time, I sort of started to jump the gun psychologically, with this. Things became a bit of head trip.

Up to this point art had been fun, but that was beginning to change a bit and the results were a little frightening.

Next Blog Issue: We see exactly how frightening this gets and see what events transpire when Ryan Henry Ward ends up in the mental hospital.

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By xavier_lopez_jr on May 10, 2010 at 9:35 PM