Cat By The Eucalyptus Tree by Ryan Louder

Cat By The Eucalyptus Tree
Oil painting on canvas, 45 x 65 cm, 2024.

A huge eucalyptus trunk fills the vertical centre of this original oil painting by London artist Ryan Louder, rising out of a tiled foreground. At its base a small black cat sits with its back turned — the single stable, fully resolved thing in a forest that is busy dissolving. Around it the canopy burns red and blue, pale light shafts cut diagonally through the interior, and the other trunks behave less like objects than like events in colour.

Signal Rating: 6/10 — Significant. Classification: Hypnagogic.

This painting by Ryan Louder is part of a body of work shaped by his neurological condition — Narcolepsy with REM Intrusion Hallucinations, clinically confirmed via MSLT at Guy's Hospital, London. The work contains hypnagogic imagery — embedded secondary images, phantom figures, and forms emerging from within the scene.

Neuroaesthetic markers identified: foliage rendered in explosive, fractured colour — reds, blues, and purples far exceeding naturalistic palette, matching hypnagogic chromatic amplification; light rays painted as solid chromatic shafts piercing downward — phosphene-like light intrusion into visual field; solitary small black cat figure at base anchors the scene as the single stable 'known' element in swirling hallucinatory environment; tree trunk monolithic and central, echoing the lighthouse motif — single fixed form amid perceptual chaos; spatial recession distorted — foreground and deep background feel equidistant.

These markers are not deliberate artistic techniques but direct visual recordings of what REM intrusion hallucinations look like. The imagery emerges from neurological experience, not metaphor. Ryan has painted over 2,000 works, with over 1,000 originals sold. Each painting in this collection has been subjected to neuroaesthetic forensic analysis to identify and catalogue the perceptual phenomena present.

One of one, accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity, carefully packaged and dispatched fully insured with a tracked courier. Any questions, just ask.