Numskull

<div>Elliott “Numskull” Routledge, a Sydney, Australia based artist, is known for contemporary and playful multidisciplinary work. Through deft color combinations, lively patterns, and compositional balance, he blends bold imagery and expressive marks to form harmonious abstraction.<br><br></div><div>For SODO Track, Elliott presents contrasting yet complimentary shapes with gestural scribbles and repeated pattern to achieve a sense of motion. His mural is set between playful works by Jillian Evelyn and Evan Fan, also characterized by graphic pattern and form and connected by the use of a color aptly named koral kicks.</div>

SODO Track

<div>Angelina “179” Villalobos, a Seattle based artist, is well known for intricate murals that feature colorful compositions painted organically, in layers of patterns. Often drawing from the natural environment and folklore, her work is a modern investigation of culture, religion, and family structure.<br><br></div><div>In <em>What Grows Around, Comes Around</em>, Angelina plays off themes of growth and movement by layering vine patterns over a serpent that slithers through an abyss. Positioned to the south of artwork by Rather Severe and Gabriel Marquez, colorful abstractions and psychedelic motifs connect the two murals.<br><br></div>

What Grows Around, Comes Around

basik

<div>Italian artist Lucio “Basik” Bolognesi creates graphic work that references medieval and renaissance art, with a focus on gestures of the hand. Painted in a minimalist color palette, these gestures are given a sharpened focus, often suggesting cultural, religious, and symbolic meaning.<br><br></div><div>In <em>Unaesthetic Aesthetic</em>, Lucio positions five hands in motion over five frames. A golden line passes through the flesh, a tribute to depictions of St. Sebastian in Renaissance art in which arrows symbolize brushes on the martyred body of the canvas. The work also references how quickly today’s society perceives and consumes a life, or an artist’s work, as images that are framed on social media.</div>

Unaesthetic Aesthetic

Celeste Byers

<div>Celeste Byers, a San Diego based artist, creates vibrant works inspired by the natural world and the mystical nature hidden in everyday life. Her site-specific murals present a magical yet familiar universe in which human subjects, wildlife, and environmental elements are interconnected and interchangeable.<br><br></div><div>In <em>Above the Clouds</em>, Celeste brings a legend from Puebla, Mexico to bear on the Pacific Northwest. Mount Rainier is reimagined in the likeness of Iztaccihuatl, a woman and sleeping mountain, this time as a woman rising through the clouds to bask in the sun. Intended to uplift transit riders with a metaphor of hope, the mural to the metaphors of weather and geography offered in nearby works by Cyrcle, Casey Weldon &amp; Syd Bee and Mary Iverson.<br><br></div>

Above the Clouds

Brian Sanchez

<div>Brian Sanchez, a Seattle-based artist, explores color relationships through abstract compositions that layer bold shape and line. His varying forms and hues investigate harmony and conflict, as they respond to one another and their surrounding environment.<br><br></div><div>In <em>Composition 2/10</em>, Brian worked with youth from Urban ArtWorks to interpret SODO Track themes of motion and progression, using a lens of color theory. The resultant painting provides a visual push and pull anchored by the building’s architectural elements. Nearby works by Zoer &amp; Velvet, Low Bros, Fernando Chamarelli and Hoxxoh create a continuum of blocks of color that progressively shift from representational to graphic abstraction.</div>

Composition 2/10

David de la Mano

<div>David de la Mano, a Uruguay based artist, creates poetic depictions of human and spirit worlds that collide. His figures, always painted in silhouette, draw from anthropological studies, folklore and people-watching to combine the past, present and future.<br><br>In <em>About Memory, </em>David offers an imaginative scene of a journey both dystopian and hopeful. Centered between Mark Warren Jacques’ celestial vision and Ricky Lee Gordon’s idyllic seascape, the murals on this long wall can be read as a tale of origin, life, and the hereafter that may flow or become one and the same.<br><br></div>

About Memory

Alex Gardner

<div>Alex Gardner, a Long Beach based artist, creates figurative works that recognize a universal sense of humanity. Emotion and spirit are captured through body language and movement, with each subject rendered in a collective uniformity devoid of the individual features commonly used to signify identity.<br><br></div><div>In <em>Personal Trainer</em>, a figure in full sprint is held by the ankle. A vision of the hard times in life as a type of resistance training, Alex invites you to “push through life, keeping your legs strong and your core tight.” Seen from the busway, his figure reflects DALeast’s cheetah; the respective subjects, rendered in inverted color schemes, sprint in opposite directions.<br><br></div>

Personal Trainer

Baso Fibonnaci

<div>Baso Fibonacci, a prominent figure in Seattle’s art scene, is known for nature-inspired works brought to life with distinctive use of color and line. Olympia-born artist Jean Nagai worked alongside Baso to bring Baso’s concept from canvas to wall.<br><br></div><div><em>Escaping a Burning Culture, </em>along with Joe Nix’s artwork due south, confront us with the Seattle artist’s dilemma: stay and work within the city’s changing landscape, industry, and culture, or accept that the city once known is gone, and move on? This dichotomy is expressed through hot and cool tones. In Baso’s case, a wolf flees the ashes of a city skyline set ablaze.<br><br></div>

Escaping a Burning Culture

Onesevennin

Ryan fifth

<div>This mural is in the Central District and is MADK tribute mural. This community holds graffiti and hip hop culture alive by throwing a “off the wall” mural competition every summer.&nbsp;</div>

MADK tribute 

Untitled

David Rice

<div>In their first collaboration, David Rice and Ola Volo blend realism and folklore in an imagined forest scene. Ola, a Canadian artist originally from Kazakhstan, brings a distinctive style drawn from multicultural mythology. David, a Portland-based painter, creates hyper-realistic renderings of regional animal life.<br><br></div><div>In <em>Terrestrial Melody, </em>their northwest animals appear to leap out of a rich storybook narrative. “Always on the move, these creatures must be proactive in their pursuit for progress,” the artists explain.<br><br></div>

Terrestrial Melody

Caratoes

<div>Caratoes, a Hong Kong-based artist, draws inspiration from global sources ranging from the Belgian church ornamentation of her youth to anime stylings. She is known for monochromatic figures that are at once fractured and flowing.<br><br></div><div>On SODO Track, her surrealist figure neighbors artist Paola Delfin’s similarly monochromatic, fragmented, and feminine subject. Conceived in tandem, both artworks echo a theme of internal transformation and movement. Caratoes’ work is driven by the separation of the mental and the physical during creative exploration. Behind her subject’s physical profile and gaze is the mind’s abstracted figurine of a golden mermaid, situated in the palm of an outstretched hand—as if offered up to the sea.<br><br></div>

Waiting For My Mind To Come Back

Christopher Paul Jordan

<div>Christopher Paul Jordan, a Tacoma-based artist, interrogates critical social issues through paintings and sculptures that integrate the virtual and the physical.<br><br></div><div>For SODO Track, and as part of his #COLORED2017 initiative showcasing the work of black artists from the US and Caribbean, Chris painted an inverted-color image of a high jumper. The jumper is frozen above the bar in the moment between rising and falling, past and future. Viewed through the inverted-color camera of a smartphone, the figure of the jumper—which was painted in hues of blue and white—emerges as black, inciting consideration of what inverted color implies.<br><br></div>

High Jump

Andrew Hem

<div>Born during his parents’ flight from Cambodia, following the Khmer Rouge genocide, artist Andrew Hem grew up in urban Los Angeles. His work evokes a powerful narrative, often featuring anonymous young figures that move through dreamlike scenes to destinations unknown.<br><br>For SODO Track, <em>Underwater Squad</em> imagines a movement not confined by time or space—a movement in which Asian warriors of different eras, ethnicities, and nationalities come together, “joining forces for the better cause.”<br><br></div>

Underwater Squad

Damien Gilley

<div>Damien Gilley, based out of Portland, Oregon, wields line and perspective as tools to transform environment and viewer perception. Inspired by science fiction, vintage video games, and computer graphics, his paintings appear to warp space with forms that shift based on a viewer’s vantage point.<br><br></div><div>For SODO Track, Damien created a simulation of split-second vision in motion. While train passengers who approach and leave the nearby SODO Station experience his artwork at low-speeds, the artwork creates a sense of “abstract blurring, that of passing buildings at high speed.”<br><br></div>

Nano-Trip

Drew Merritt

<div>Drew Merritt, a Los Angeles-based artist by way of rural New Mexico, is a contemporary master of realism who brings the human form to impressive scale with spray paint. Drawing inspiration from Renaissance painters, he paints subjects of today in poses or wardrobes familiar to classical works.<br><br></div><div>For SODO Track, Drew painted a figure of traditional beauty unconventionally upside down. She gazes and extends a hand towards Joram Rouke’s subject to the south, while carrying with her CYRCLE’s neighboring message of struggle and hope.<br><br></div>

Ellen Picken

<div>Ellen Picken is an artist living in Spokane, Washington. Her work is characterized by geometry and line, often wrapping public three-dimensional surfaces with her graphic visions.<br><br></div><div>For SODO Track, Ellen created layers that “build upward, slide over each other, cleft and crack, shift back and forth, create the rhythm of an abstract train track. <em>Stratigraphic </em>references the environment directly, offering a play in black and white alongside the similarly abstract but multi-colored works of neighboring artists Damien Gilley and Christopher Derek Bruno.<br><br></div>

Stratigraphic

Ola Volo

Christopher Derek Bruno

<div>Christopher Derek Bruno, a Seattle-based artist, plays with perspective, color, and form to create dynamic visual experiences. His carefully composed and colored geometries create the illusion of changing dimensionality, an illusion enacted by the viewer’s motion and shifting vantage point.<br><br></div><div>For SODO Track, Derek created his largest-scale work to date. With a full color spectrum of 21 hand-mixed values, he transformed the entirety of a multi-plane building, activating nine separate surfaces. This site-specific work explores light as a means to “detect and decipher motion,” visually referencing two properties of light—redshift and blueshift<em>—</em>commonly used to “measure for the direction of a galaxy/star/object/particle as it moves through space and time.”<br><br></div><div><br></div>

Exterior Intervention 1: angle of incidence

Daleast

<div>DALeast is a prolific muralist known for intricately woven depictions that at once unravel and burst with energy. DALeast was born in Wuhan, China, and lived for many years in South Africa, but most recently he spent two years on a personal journey through India and Nepal, among other places.<br><br></div><div>In <em>Farewell Train</em>, a cheetah unravels while in motion, illustrating the impermanence we experience on a daily basis, as we travel with speed through time. The glow at the feline’s head represents the future we each imagine and seek.<br><br></div>

Farewell Train

Cyrcle

<div>CYRCLE, the Los Angeles-based duo, is a collaborative effort between David Torres and David Leavitt (b. Bellevue, WA). Known for a continually evolving style and public explorations of power, hope and duality, CYRCLE shifts between complex composition and bold simplicity seeking the best method to communicate an idea for each particular environment.<br><br></div><div>For SODO Track, CYRCLE uses only text and a black-and-white palette across 275 feet, offering a poetic moment in just five words. Meant to capture the viewers’ attention as they process the message in motion, the artwork uses Seattle’s weather as a metaphor, offering hope to “the dark, lost and lonely.”<br><br></div>

This too shall pass… Then out came the sun

Broken Fingaz

<div>Broken Fingaz is a three-man crew from Haifa, Israel. Their site-specific work views culture and humanity with a wide lens, offering tongue-in-cheek reflections that balance insightful critique with a hint of nihilistic apathy.<br><br>In <em>Fingaz Magic Ink</em>, they address the internal conflict of creating art in a consumer-driven world. Leveraging graphic design and branding modalities, the crew offers a fictitious product, playing on the idea of selling snake oil. The work is split into five frames that, when viewed in motion, create a spinning and sparkling animation—like a flipbook for transit riders.<br><br></div>

Fingaz Magic Ink

Addison Karl

<div>Addison Karl, a roaming artist with ties to Seattle, wields color and line with unique layering techniques, inspired by the process of printmaking. Addison is registered Chickasaw and Choctaw.<br><br>In <em>Chief Seattle’s Grandchildren</em>, he imagines “the city’s natural state before Manifest Destiny development and encroachment” while giving thanks to the “stewards of their natural heritage lands.” Inspired by the thick canopy of today’s Schmitz Park in West Seattle, the setting is watched over and guarded by Mary Lou Slaughter and her son Michael Halady of the Duwamish tribe. As we view the work in transit, the moment is fleeting, reminding us that, without care, our surrounding forests could be too.<br><br></div><div><br></div>

Chief Seattle’s Grandchildren

This is a legal graffiti wall in Olympia. Provided by users of legal-walls.net.<br /><br />
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Olympia Freewall

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Rainier / Tully's Building

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Maple Leaf / Wheaton Way 

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redmond

This is a legal graffiti wall in Woodinville. Provided by users of legal-walls.net.<br /><br />
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Artworks in Seattle