Freedom

Freedom is a reflection of seeing many hundreds of dancers practice and rehearse with the ballet teacher I used to play piano for during university years. Accompanying dancers and watching them perform and jump, seeing their smiles as they land exactly how they wanted to, is a happy memory I won’t forget. Because when they perform live, they don’t smile and laugh as they do in rehearsal. This is what I want to reflect when I paint dancers, the joy that they feel. The freedom. 

Ryan Louder is a London-based artist known for his vivid, hallucinatory paintings inspired by real-time REM intrusion episodes a neurological phenomenon linked to his narcolepsy. Diagnosed at Guy's Hospital, this rare condition causes dream states to bleed into waking life, allowing Ryan to capture surreal visions as they unfold. His work explores the threshold between consciousness and imagination, often layering "images within images" to evoke shifting realities and altered perception.

Ryan's practice merges visual storytelling with neurodivergent insight-transforming a medical anomaly into a portal of constant creativity.