Ryan 'Henry' Ward is a Seattle based artist. Born and raised on a farm in Montana, and later transplanted to the Pacific Northwest at the age of ten, Ryan has lived in a variety of places in the region. As an artist, he began his craft at the age of three, drawing on the walls of his childhood home. He has a deep history of sharing his art with the world. In third grade he had his own comic strip named Mr. Pib and Ernie and while in the fourth grade he began winning art competitions which landed his imagery on t-shirts. He self-published greeting cards throughout his childhood, and in high school began yet another comic strip, The Cheese Life, which was published on the back of Omega Force comic books.

Ryan graduated with a degree in Art, Writing and Storytelling for Children from Fairhaven College in Western Washington. It was at Fairhaven that he began to focus on his writing, theatre crafts and painting. He has written and illustrated several books for loved ones, as well as illustrated children’s books authored and published by others.

Since June of 2008, Ryan has completed over 110 murals, and it is this body of work that he has become most famous for. Previous to becoming a public muralist, he had painted dozens of murals in private residences around the Pacific Northwest. He has created works in India and Thailand, as well as four murals in the Dominican Republic. Selling over 400 original canvases in Seattle over the past couple of years, Ryan's vision of creating primitive images with a dream like surreal quality has come to fruition... He wants the natural rawness of the painting process to show through his balanced, bright, and whimsical work. He has travelled the world and uses painting techniques found in the Japanese brushstroke. The artist's color pallet is derived from the current Southern African pop icon movement. Over the course of his life and through it all, he has formed his own original and unique style; surreal character art that is accessible to everyone, regardless of their background in art.