Ross Collado

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 acrylic: 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.