Ross Collado is a self-taught abstract expressionist painter based in Capitol Hill, Seattle. He is Filipino, started drawing at age six — designing greeting cards and classroom visual aids for siblings and cousins — then spent his college years studying Computer Science, setting painting aside. In 2020, during the COVID-19 shutdown and the BLM protests that filled the streets outside his Capitol Hill building, he returned to the canvas. He switched from watercolor to oil: a medium capable of the depth and texture the work required.
In Love Looks Pretty on You, the canvas divides into competing warm and cool zones—a red-orange-yellow dominance in the upper two-thirds gives way to deep blues and teals in the lower third, with a central white passage acting as a fulcrum. Geometric shapes—ovals, rectangles, small squares in burnt sienna, cream, and navy—sit atop gestural washes of color that bleed and blur across the surface, creating a tension between deliberate placement and atmospheric dissolution. The spatial composition flattens despite the layering, as if all forms exist simultaneously on a single plane rather than receding into depth, making the painting feel more like a densely populated pattern than a coherent space. Collado's title claims sentimentality while his technique refuses it, instead producing a somewhat claustrophobic accumulation that reads more as visual noise than harmony. His first serious painting, Nightfall, was made while tear gas drifted through the neighborhood and the cries of protesters echoed outside. The collector who commissioned it later gifted it back to Collado, telling him his soul seemed trapped in it. That painting’s story circulated, and so did the work. By 2023 he had mounted solo exhibitions at Red Sky Gallery in Lake Forest Park, Studio 103 in Pioneer Square, and Gallery Axis in Pioneer Square. His work was selected for the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art Spotlight exhibition — chosen from approximately 3,400 submissions by 606 Puget Sound artists. In December 2024 he joined the Portland Art Museum Rental Sales Gallery.
His paintings now operate in a more minimal register than his early visceral canvases: stark contrasts, deep color fields, the image reduced to what holds attention at distance and at close range equally. Love Looks Pretty On You, the top work at JG, demonstrates this — a near-square canvas where vivid color is set against a near-black ground, the composition balanced to the edge of instability. He has described making art not as therapy but as a series of intense moments. The painting is not processing. It is the thing itself.
It’s like I am walking through a creative tunnel of exploding colors and ideas waiting to come to life through a brush stroke. Making art is not therapeutic — it’s a series of intense moments.
