‘Always be building something’: Fairhaven alumnus Ryan “Henry” Ward shares his journey to artistic success

You’ve seen his Sassy Sasquatch on public-facing buildings, garage doors and backyard fences across Washington state. You might have scrolled past his pop-eyed owls, bunnies and bison online, and if you’ve spent time in Seattle, you’ve definitely seen them splashed across buildings downtown. 

Once you notice Ryan “Henry” Ward’s work, it’s hard to miss and even harder to forget. An alumnus of Western’s Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies, Henry has become Seattle’s most prolific muralist and one of those rare artists who, despite significant personal struggles, locked in early and figured out how to make a living off his paintings. 

He’s been doing it since 2008, and in his first three years alone, Henry sold more than 2,000 canvas paintings and completed more than 100 murals. His work is always freehand — he never uses projectors or grids. And over the last year, Henry painted Sassy Sasquatch into more than 1,000 murals statewide as a community public art project.

Henry is currently partnering with Seattle Waterfront Marketplace, where he sells his originals and reproductions while continuing to expand his reach through public art. 

In an attempt to wrap our arms around a collection of wins, losses and complicated truths about his life and career, Western Today sat down with Henry to talk about his time at Fairhaven, his recent projects and what it took to build a career as a visual artist.

WWU: You recently finished painting more than 1,000 public-facing sasquatch murals across the state of Washington. What was that experience like?

HENRY: “Yeah, I’ve been doing that character in my own painting — putting it up on surfaces under bridges and on trains, things like that, for a while. Someone had painted some graffiti on my mural, and I painted just the sasquatch head over it to take my wall back. 

Instead of fixing my murals after they’d get vandalized, I started adding to them; I guess it’s kind of my own form of graffiti. That’s how the sasquatch head, in portrait style without the body, came to be. The head is where the sun is at in this character. 

I was driving around one time, and I had this urge to paint it everywhere. I needed the sasquatch head there, there, there and there! After a few years of thinking that way, one of my employees asked, Why don’t you just do it?

So I posted my idea on Facebook about a year ago, and it blew up. I asked for 250 bucks for each mural as a suggested donation. I was willing to do the project no matter the pay — and I worked with people who didn’t have that kind of budget — but I thought it would be helpful if I got some money. Over 1,500 people signed up for a mural. 

The organizing and mapping took 100% of my waking hours. I went all over — eastern Washington to the peninsula, Tacoma and Olympia, up to Blaine and everywhere in between. Kirkland, Bellevue, Redmond. I did million-dollar houses and single-wide trailers, and I averaged five murals per day.

The coolest thing for me was watching communities come together. I’d paint a sasquatch on someone’s garage door on a cul-de-sac in Kent, and all the neighbors would come out and talk to each other. A lot of them were meeting for the first time. 

Building community and seeing people talk to each other every day for seven months was really fulfilling. I’m a person who values that kind of thing — I have a heart for people and community. Sometimes an artist can feel selfish or their work can be perceived as self-centered, but it’s cool that it can create an outpouring of people coming together.” 

WWU: What was the first thing you created and loved?

HENRY: “In third grade, I had this comic strip that was Mr. Pibb and his dog Ernie. 

I remember my grandpa telling me, If you want to be a cartoonist, you have to do something original. You can't make it like other people’s. 

So, from age five to eight, I worked on creating originality. I was working hard at it — it was really real at that age. 

The character, Mr. Pibb, was this blind guy who had a pet alligator that he thought was a dog, and he’d take it for walks, and it would destroy everything in its path, like cars and stuff. It was very nine-year-old humor, but it was the thing I thought was cool. 

In fifth grade, that character won a T-shirt competition for a mini marathon. So everybody in school was wearing my cartoon on their shirt. I remember being really proud of that. I remember thinking I was on the right path for this cartoon thing that I wanted to do when I grew up.”

WWU: What was the first thing you sold that surprised you?

HENRY: “In high school, I started this other cartoon strip called The Cheese Life, and it was single-frame cartoons. I did some water paintings of four of them, printed them on T-shirts and took them on a road trip to West Yellowstone. In a souvenir shop, I asked if they were interested in carrying my line of T-shirts. 

And the guy said, Yeah, I'll order 10,000 each. 

I wasn't prepared, right? Like, I didn’t know that anyone would say yes; I was just kind of messing around. But that was another one of those successes. 

And I remember thinking, Someday, when I’m ready, I can do this.  

They were kind of funny cartoons; it was a bunch of animals — a buffalo, a moose, something like an elk and maybe a bear, I think. And there was a very West Yellowstone nature-y background with a little trail.  

Gary Larson was one of my biggest influences. I loved Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoons, and that was the format. So I was kind of mimicking his format, but doing it in my own way with my own characters. It was the single frame; one story says it all. 

After that, I got more interested in dropping the joke and focusing on creating a character with a complex expression — and that being enough, you know? 

That’s what my style grew out of. I was able to do canvas paintings where I dropped the joke and punchline and kept the picture. And that was because I was following my nature and what was easiest for me.

The first place I ever displayed art was the Bagelry in Bellingham. The second show I did was in the Old Town Cafe. And every piece in that show sold. I had some professors in school who bought my work too. These were some of the indications that I had ability and something special to work with.” 

WWU: What was your experience at Western’s Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies like?

HENRY: “I really loved Fairhaven. I was there for three years and studied political science before I realized what I really wanted to do. 

I really enjoyed it, and I didn't want to leave. I remember my last quarter trying to figure out a way to stay at Fairhaven. I applied to teach a class right after I graduated. They just told me I needed to go out and live a life. I was kind of in love with it there though. 

I loved the small classes, the really interesting conversations and working on things with other people. I loved exploring myself as an artist and creative being and having that be my focus — and learning to own that part of myself. 

Being at Fairhaven helped me really claim my identity as an artist, a creative being. 

I had great professors. Some of them are still there. Stan Tag was my one of my main people. I graduated 20, maybe 25 years ago. One of my best friends to this day is from classes at Fairhaven. 

Fairhaven fostered a good environment for what I was interested in. I wanted to write children’s books, so I took a lot of creative writing classes and some art classes.” 

Professor at Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies Stan Tag remembers Ward in much the same way. 

WWU: Things weren’t easy after school for you. What happened between your time studying in Fairhaven and the beginning of your professional art career? 

HENRY: “I realized the market was overflooded — everyone’s writing children’s books, right? 

So I let that go after school and found social work in Bellingham. I worked as a recreation therapist for kids with psychological and emotional disorders in a residential facility and with people in AIDS hospice at Sean Humphrey House. 

I also worked with duly diagnosed kids in home care. I worked on my art on the side and with my patients, but I wasn’t worried about making a career out of my art. I didn’t want to follow some gallery-museum path with critics and the whole thing. And graphic design with corporate logos wasn’t a good fit for me. 

Eventually I got burned out in social work — low pay and a lot of hours. I needed to work with my hands, so I went to work with my brother, and we started a landscape company. I enjoyed the creative aspects of it. I built driftwood furniture and cool water features. 

But when I was 31, I was in a four-wheeler accident. I went off a cliff, and it landed on top of me and pinned me down. I wasn't able to really have a normal job because I couldn’t sit or stand for very long. I had a head injury, and I was going through the process of healing my spine. 

At that point, I was either going to do the disability thing or try to figure out how to make a living doing something else. So I started painting. I got some paintings together and found a gallery, and it was pretty successful right from the start.”

WWU: What were your early days as a houseless Seattle artist like?

HENRY: “I got into that first gallery and then I moved into a truck and camper, and I basically lived out of vehicles for about a decade. Just freeing up all my bills — I only had a cell phone bill. I had a sort of romantic love affair with the philosophy of minimalism — I was very into Henry David Thoreau and Jack Kerouac. But the four-wheeler accident caused me to have a dependence on opiates.

Through the beginning of my career, there were a lot of trials and tribulations. I really went through a rough time with addiction and recovery. I had to do some mental hospital stays — the first four or five years of my career were kind of riddled with that until I was able to face that and get over it. 

When I was living in vehicles, I parked right next to Gasworks Park. They have a covered area with bathroom facilities where they kept the light on all night. So I utilized that space as my art studio. 

In the beginning stages, the homeless community was my community. I got to know everyone, and I used to do a lot of dumpster diving and then cook meals for everybody. So they were the people in Seattle that really knew me on a personal level. 

With my drug addiction, it took me a minute to turn my art into a career. You know, I was spending all my money on drugs, so I wasn't able to climb out of that for a while. And I wasn’t really in a hurry to climb out of it because I didn’t mind it — living in the vans or a truck and camper. I lived in a school bus for a while, and that was just the lifestyle I was comfortable with.

But I was becoming a very successful artist during that time. I mean, by 2010, I’d done over 100 murals in the city. The most anyone had ever done before that was like 86 murals in Honolulu or something, back in the 90s. I was able to paint and paint and paint and paint, and it ended up working out. 

One time, I was completely homeless, and I lost the vehicle I was living in. I was becoming really well known, so I was being interviewed on television a lot, and I was in different papers. I remember meeting Q13 reporters, and I had to go to Fred Meyer and like, “borrow some clothes” for the day so I could, like, be on TV and talk about how great my life is when I’m, like, living under a bush, you know? 

It hasn’t been the easiest path. But in February, it’ll be 18 years that I’ve been making a living with my art. I have a very large body of work, and I’m just really grateful that I get to keep doing it. 

All my murals have been commissioned. But you were asking if I was doing other street art, and I was. I was compulsively putting up wheat pastes and stickers and different forms of graffiti and stuff like that. I was really, like every day, putting content out into the public. Even if I wasn’t painting a mural, I was doing long walks and putting stickers on the backs of every stop sign. 

I’d get into wheat pasting for six months at a time and put a ton of stuff up. So it’s been really heavy, constant output. 

I just had the time to do it. I kind of gave myself the time to do it. And I did it through all my struggles too. Like, those things didn’t stop me. It’s like a force in me that has always been going, regardless of my own personal complications while becoming a healthy person, you know? I just have to let it come through if I don’t want to have mental health issues. 

I consider myself now a very healthy and balanced person for the most part. I have a roof over my head, and I make pretty good money. Life’s pretty comfortable and good for me in comparison. You know, it’s at least more normalized for someone in my age bracket now.” 

WWU: What advice do you have for WWU students and young creatives?

HENRY: “One of the big things I’ve learned is that no matter what you do, it will probably dry up. 

So, always be building something. While you’re succeeding with one thing, prepare yourself for the next thing because your audience has a size. 

Everyone you can reach will either purchase or not purchase your stuff, and then it’s done. So how do you keep it going? How do you intrigue new audiences and diversify? 

It’s important to realize that your career is not over just because people stop buying your art in a certain way. 

Once something is actually succeeding, you’ve probably been doing it so long, you’ve lost interest. Because to get it to a point of success, you’ve already put the creative work into manifesting it. 

It took me a while to learn this. I remember having these really successful periods, and then all of a sudden, for months, there’s nobody hitting me up for work. 

And I would be like, Man, I was just on TV and in the paper, and everybody wanted my stuff, and now nobody does. It was haunting, you know? 

I didn’t know what was going on, but 18 years into this, I have a better understanding of what and why that occurs and how to be a step ahead of it.”

WWU: What’s next for Henry?

HENRY: I’m thinking about writing a book that’s based around a unique approach to an art career for middle-class kids who don’t see a clear path forward. 

See more of Henry’s art here.

Learn more about designing your own education at WWU’s Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies here. 

Allie Spikes covers the WWU Graduate School and Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies for University Communications. Reach out to her with story ideas at spikesa@wwu.edu.