Geoff Carter 12 November 2009 Seattle 2,762 views 2 Comments Print This Post  Email This Post

As you read these words, a superhero cat has saved a pit bull. A goat has learned a new song on his guitar. And Ryan Henry Ward has probably created another mural.

The workaholic Seattle artist is on a self-made mission to create fifty murals in and around the city. He finds blank walls on houses and businesses, gets permission to paint fanciful creatures on them, and does just that, free of charge. Were you to drive around Seattle today you’d almost have to go out of your way to avoid seeing his colorful works in Wallingford, Ballard, Fremont … I hesitate to make a complete list of murals and neighborhoods, because he’ll render it obsolete before I finish writing it. He’s averaging three murals a week.

“I have a little bit of OCD,” says Ward, relaxing on one of the deep couches at Fremont’s (sadly defunct) Orange Splot Gallery . His “goofy dog” Merlin sits at our feet, tail wagging happily. “I drive around looking at every wall, thinking, ‘Is this a highly trafficked wall? Is it worth doing?’ I’m a pretty intuitive person, so I try to feel things.”

My intuition tells me good things about Ward almost immediately after I shake his hand. I immediately realize that it’s not an ego thing for him. Soft-spoken and self-effacing, he simply wants to make ugly walls look good.

“The first place I walked into, the guy was really excited (about the prospect of a mural),” he says. “His wall had some nasty stuff on it at the time and he said OK, as long as there was a picture of his pit bull in the mural. I love dogs and animals, and I love pit bulls, actually. They’re sweet dogs, controversial dogs. I like controversial subjects.”

His work ethic is rooted in both the sweet and the controversial. Born in Bozeman, Montana and raised in Enumclaw, Ward enjoyed “two fairly rural upbringings.” His mother is a horse trainer; his brother runs a successful landscaping business. He takes unabashed joy in animals, in all things nature.

But he wasn’t to stay on the farm. Earning an “interdisciplinary, self-made degree” in “Writing, Art and Storytelling for Children” from Bellingham’s Fairhaven College, Ward forged his own path, traveling the world and working with at-risk youth, with AIDS patients and as a care provider for the developmentally disabled.

He worked with his brother for a time, became restless and decided to return to social work. Unfortunately, he suffered a debilitating injury (“I’m almost missing a disc in my back”) that left him unable to stand for extended periods of time.

“I don’t have insurance, and back surgery is fifty-five thousand bucks,” says Ward. “I had these dreams that were unrealistic, so I had to do something large-scale to make them happen.”

Luckily for us, that meant turning to art full time. Once you’ve seen Ryan Henry Ward’s art, you can’t imagine the world ever having been without it. It’s simple in line and in theme (virtually every one of Ward’s murals tells a story you can grok from a moving car), and you feel as if you’ve grown up with it. Even his signature — a lowercase “henry” inside a white oval — has a cheering manner about it.

It’s little wonder that many of Ward’s influences are children’s book illustrators — Quentin Blake and Shel Silverstein in particular — as well as edgy caricaturist Ralph Steadman and the shaved-head punks who drew on skateboards in his teen years.

“I have a vision for my street work that’s a little different than my gallery work,” he says. “I wanted it to have a really strong emotional content of compassion and imagination, and tie the two together in a way that is fun for people to look at.”

That’s what makes Ward’s art special: It just plain make you happy. Orange Splot owner Kevin McKouen loves it enough to have purchased one painiting for himself: It depicts a moose adrift on a lonely sea in a tiny boat with a single paddle. It’s a sadly comic scene, but there’s something in the moose’s determined manner that touches you. He’s even got a soft orange glow about him, as if radiating warmth and courage.

“I bought this in February or March, and I was feeling a lot like the moose at the time,” says McKouen. “I’d only been open for half a year and I wasn’t sure where the gallery was going or where I was going. I was so glad once I put (Ward’s) stuff up. Every time I’m down I look at his stuff and it brings me up.”

Two walls of Orange Splot are covered with Ward’s art. As strongly as his murals read in passing, so his paintings read on close inspection. The themes are the same — they all have a “whimsical edginess,” as he describes it — but the lines are deeper and the stories more oblique. Why is the witch clutching that teddy bear? Why is that oval-faced masked bandit (Ward calls him a “Nosferatu”) in a showdown with a hanging spider? “There is something going on,” says Ward with a grin. “But you have to fill in what it is.”

That seems an apt description of where Ryan Henry Ward is at this point in time. He’s got big dreams; he only needs to paint a ladder to reach them. He’d like to lead a documentary film crew to various third-world hotspots, creating murals and working with people in need.

“When I was in Thailand I worked with Burmese refugee monks, teaching them English in exchange for room and board. They’re people that I really care about, and I’d like to see the Burmese situation noticed in the news. I’d go into Burma and do a mural, go into Calcutta and do a mural, go into Tijuana and do a border mural … I do want to be successful as an artist, but I also want to be a … soldier for the people, I guess. For the people who have the least, and are the most oppressed.”

In the meantime, he’s devoted to coloring in Seattle’s blank spaces, and helping to promote Orange Splot. Its curator has become one of Ward’s closest friends.

“He’s just a stellar dude,” says Ward of McKouen. “He’s been a big inspiration to me as well; he traveled the United States living in his Volkswagen van, and I’ve lived in vehicles. I live in a vehicle now, so I can accomplish what I need to accomplish. I don’t have a whole lot of money. I invest all the money I make on art back into more art — art supplies, canvases.

“And feeding my dog,” he adds, giving Merlin an affectionate pat. “And sometimes feeding myself.”

- Geoff Carter

See more of Ryan Henry Ward’s murals in this Flickr gallery!

This piece originally appeared in NWsource.com.