Richard Morhous | Ode

“Ode,” is an exhibition of new paintings by Seattle-based artist Richard Morhous. Emphasizing painterly qualities and expressionistic color, Morhous creates palpable, new explorations of pictorial space. Through interlocking shapes and dappled brushwork his paintings illustrate dynamic cityscapes, still life, and landscapes, rendering unordinary transformations of familiar subjects. The artist reveals, “This exhibition is an ode to shared experiences. Some transient, some forever gone, some eternal. The ephemeral beauty of life.”

In one of Morhous’s paintings, “Bay View” Morhous depicts scattered raindrops on a windowpane visually suspended between our vantage point within a cable car and the cityscape beyond. Another entitled “Browse” reveals the structural layers of colorfully bound books, as random as a city skyline, found in the cart of a bookstore. Morhous points to the exploration of cities on a large scale and the “building like feel” of books discovered before him, on an intimate scale. The artist notes, “such duality doesn’t present itself everyday.”