About

Rye Watts is an oil painter based in Portland, Oregon, whose figurative and narrative works explore memory, identity, ethics, and the human condition through symbolism and dreamlike imagery. Drawing from the biological sciences, philosophy, and natural history, her paintings investigate the relationship between interior psychological experience and the external world.

Working primarily in oil on linen, Rye's current practice examines the emotional and psychological terrain of transition and becoming. Through gesture, nonlinear narrative, and the tension between stillness and movement, her paintings inhabit a space between memory, anticipation, and lived experience.

Influenced by Henri Bergson's conception of time as accumulation rather than sequence, Rye employs dramatic light, improbable spatial relationships, and restrained planes of color to construct moments that exist outside conventional chronology. By unsettling expectations of gravity, scale, and narrative continuity, her work proposes time not as a progression of events but as a layered and simultaneous experience.

Her work has been exhibited in galleries internationally and is held in private collections across the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and Spain.

Instagram: RyeWatts

Exhibitions and Showcases