Ryla the Creator’s Nostalgic Dreamscape

Stepping into Ryla the Creator’s studio, adorned corner to corner with her paintings, I was transported to another “home,” a universal wonderland that speaks to instincts long-lost through the passage of time, one that’s been squeezed deep into the recesses of memory. Ryla’s artworks, portals to the past, demand your immediate attention to the art of homes we’ve long abandoned – childhood. 

Her work encapsulates the hazy nostalgia, the child-like whimsy that’s been sanded away by our everyday responsibilities and anxieties. No, not in the traditional sense – you won’t necessarily catch sight of your childhood icons in Ryla’s playful arsenal. Rather, Ryla handles these spells of nostalgia the way we experience them now, through the foggy lens of adulthood, our burdened minds only able to allocate such precise attention to the now-foreign wonderlands of our childhoods. Ryla brews together a personalized mix of surrealism and abstraction to deliver us a misplaced feeling we’re rarely afforded the pleasure of indulging in. Her end game? To revitalize the magic we felt as kids. This is Ryla’s contribution to making the world a brighter place. With her pieces, she takes us along on fieldtrips where we can “play make-believe,” engage in “imaginary playtime,” and believe, if only for a second, that “fairies exist.” 

Rather, Ryla handles these spells of nostalgia the way we experience them now, through the foggy lens of adulthood, our burdened minds only able to allocate such precise attention to the now-foreign wonderlands of our childhoods.

“I want people to connect to my artwork in a playful, childlike way. Because I feel like that’s part of what’s wrong with the world, that people have lost their childlike wonder, that magic. I feel like we need to heighten the magic we used to feel as kids, that make-belief, imaginary playtime, believing fairies exist– things like that. I want to help people unlock that when they look at my art.”

The lax conditions of surrealism and abstraction allow for the same happy-go-lucky nature that we’ve now outgrown to shine through. This concoction, where “surrealism gives the viewer an opportunity to play make-believe, and the abstraction allows the artwork to have its own story” has allowed Ryla to express the afterglow of a childhood long forgotten, without having to intrude too much with fine, impersonal details. Through her fluid brushstrokes and vibrant colors, she speaks a language that we all instinctively understand, despite the likely fact that your childhood probably didn’t look too similar to mine, if at all.   

“I want people to connect to my artwork in a playful, childlike way. Because I feel like that’s part of what’s wrong with the world, that people have lost their childlike wonder, that magic.

While this agenda of reliving childhood whimsy has always been close to Ryla’s heart, it took her a good bit of exploring to find the medium most compatible with channeling that joy to others. Always a creative, Ryla had moved to New York from Australia in 2018 with the intention of pursuing a career in acting– comedic acting, to be precise. After all, laughter is the best medicine for our afflictions. This never quite took flight; the shifts in the industry were heading to an environment where Ryla’s style couldn’t flourish. With the pandemic sweeping in, along with inevitable unemployment, like many of us, she’d found herself with an excess of free time on her hands. Art had always been a reliable avenue for where her bouts of creativity could be momentarily satiated, having taken a few art classes here and there throughout her adolescence, a hobby she’d absentmindedly carried along throughout her life. But in the doomsday frenzy we’d all found ourselves in, the need for art became alarmingly present. She fell in love with painting, having “her creative itch scratched,” and, by fate, a budding art community had welcomed Ryla in with open arms, and she became a full-time artist from late 2020 to mid 2023.   

“It’s not like I’ve been painting since I was young, or that it’s always been my dream to be an artist. I just always loved being creative, that’s inherently who I am at my core. I just never thought it could be this way, but I’m really happy it happened,” the artist explained.

Though the struggle of balancing financial stability and artistic aspirations is something all creatives battle, sustaining yourself in New York City is no easy feat. We discussed the characteristic oversaturation that plagues all big cities that house creatives, and how artists can stand out amidst the congestion of artistry. Some turn to tagging that much-too-empty wall on the corner of the block, others fight for space by plastering their stickers on busy mailboxes throughout the city, biding their time before the city scrapes any sign of color off. Ryla doesn’t partake in these fights for the spotlight, after all, she resigned, “It’s a numbers game and a thing of luck. There’s no rhyme or reason behind it. It’s the luck of the draw.” She doesn’t have the secret formula to success, especially in our age of modernity, where we become digitized numbers in the deep sea of Meta, guided by the elusive waves of the algorithm. But, staying true to herself? That, she can do; she said, “it’s difficult to stand out, and honestly, we’re in the year 2025– what’s new? Everything has been done to some degree. No one has reinvented the wheel and done something innovative. So, to me, it’s less about what I need to do to stand out, and more about how I make sure that I’m expressing myself.”

“It’s not like I’ve been painting since I was young, or that it’s always been my dream to be an artist. I just always loved being creative, that’s inherently who I am at my core. I just never thought it could be this way, but I’m really happy it happened,”

But that led me to the one great question that I myself, as an artist, have tossed around every which way, at every possible angle my brain could conjure up, in search of a clear-cut answer: “How do I express my most authentic self through my art?” Sorry to disappoint, but just like art itself, it’s open to infinite interpretations. For Ryla, expressing herself through her art has been a never-ending journey, maneuvered by the invisible hand of fate. One major shift in her artistic journey had arisen during the time she was sharing her studio with a fellow artist, one who specialized in oil paints. She remarked, “I was sitting here and painting more, and I realized I don’t love this focused, hyper-detailed work I was doing. My first studio-mate, she was an oil painter so she works a lot more fluidly, everything is more soft and the shapes have a surrealist element, and yet they are human so you can resonate with them.” And so, organically, she drew inspiration from her friend and fellow artist, and managed to find something that stuck. While it’s not the end goal for her – as she believes strongly that artists shouldn’t be too stuck in their ways to the point of artistic stagnation – it’s what’s been most attuned to her goals of spreading childlike bliss. 

At the moment, Ryla has found herself in a bit of a conundrum, solving the business half of the artist equation. “There’s no mid-tier in New York. There are the events for upcoming artists that want you to see their work… I’ve done that. I’ve been doing this for four – almost five – years now. I’ve worked my way to the next tier, but there’s not much in that next tier, because you’re too expensive for that market, but I don’t really fit in with the bigger galleries because they don’t know who I am, and they don’t respect me because of that,” she remarked, “there’s this weird jump from being an unknown to a known artist. You gotta figure out how to get there and make a name for yourself. At the end of the day, it’s all a game. It’s like dating; dating should come from the heart and be organic. And all of a sudden, it’s a game, like, “what are you gonna do for me? What is your art gonna do for me if I buy your canvas?”

The future of the art industry may seem dim, but there’s lots of surprises to be found. Most recently, Ryla has found her calling in live painting – the theatre of it all plays on her old passions as an aspiring comic. Its immersive and inviting, community-based nature has equipped her with some muscle in the fight against the cold, hyper-transactional smog threatening to swallow up the industry as a whole. When you have crypto-billionaires scurrying to outbid their fellow cronies for their next high-end piece/not-so-discreet front for money-laundering, simply joining each other in a festival of open canvases gains a whole new purpose. 

If you ever get the opportunity to check out Ryla’s works, whether in a gallery or live performance, take it. Allow yourself, if only a few minutes, to read in between the broad, glowing brushstrokes, and if you feel that youthful naivety tug you in – let it. Squeezing yourself into that old 5th grade uniform you stumbled across, tagged with peers’ signatures marking a first of many farewells, would be only a brutal reminder of long-gone years, ones you couldn’t appreciate enough in the moment as the concept of foresight hadn’t yet occurred to us. Ryla’s pieces offer you a brighter alternative to explore our natural need for nostalgic daydreaming, by holding space for you to reminisce on hazy puerile days of your childhood that were full of subtle, yet crucial, art.

Written by Lily Seo