I crossed the threshold into ArtX Contemporary with an assumption. It wasn’t about the painter William Song, whose work is currently on exhibition at this inviting Pioneer Square gallery. Rather, I walked into the gallery assuming its team of curators would introduce me to artworks that deliver an immersive experience as I’ve come to expect when stepping into their space. William Song’s work moved me to cross a second threshold into his paintings through each one’s scale, color expression and emanation of energy, reinforcing my expectation of an immersive experience.
The gallery has spotlighted evolutions of Song’s paintings through cyclical solo exhibitions. The artist’s work, however, was refreshingly new to me. The Pacific Northwest oil painter channels the intense energy of phenomena that strike emotional chords he is driven to express on canvas.
Revealed on the First Thursday of June, paintings that Song created in 2024, the Year of the Dragon—also being Song’s birth year—are assembled in a series entitled Draco Arising. Song embraces the Latin word for dragon, or draco, originating from a Greek verb that literally means to see clearly or to watch intently. This parsing of draco suggests that Song is less leaning into visual representation and aiming more for a certain visual clarity—even as his paintings are abstract. Draco, more broadly, conjures a dragon’s energy, expelling of fire and serpentine coiling through its muscular body and Song’s paintings express this power through manifestations of Earth’s elements and the cosmos.
Song is experienced in and sensitive to the usage of words. The more he encountered language that was inauthentic or crafted to manipulate, however, he felt it was a constrained space. He came to view words as unreliable, insufficient to convey the energetic bearing of human experiences. With this realization, he was compelled to return to painting as a more basic preverbal mode of expression with energetic clarity.
Above all, Song graciously attributes his development as a painter to friend and fellow Pacific Northwest artist William Ivey (1919-1992) who inspired Song in the latter years of Ivey’s life. Ivey, Song observed, took his practice as an artist seriously, and he modeled how Song could commit to painting as his purpose.
Ivey maintained that the color mixing and the composition of shapes and lines aren’t difficult skills to acquire. Like Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko whom Ivey studied under, Ivey was concerned with what a painter did with color. His interpretations generated lush abstract expressionist works, wherein Song felt their impact along with a resonance with his own instinct in painting.
Song’s paintings in his current show activate energies radiating from the artist’s chosen hues and tones of color. Draco Arising and Draco Arisen, paired on a gallery wall, manifest a progression of energies, though each work also stands alone in its sensory field. Draco Arising captures a glimpse of the dragon’s awakening to awareness of the strength that it bears as it arises in sky elements—what can be discerned as a softer frequency of energy that Song’s lighter tones of color carry. In contrast, the moment of Draco, once arisen, heightens the intensity of energy, with explosions of hot color and clouds of scorching fire.
When I faced Eltanin Portal straight on, thick, horizontal unrestrained strokes of blues and white imbue the image with motion, while the scant and fragmented traces of red and orange intensify the energy of the underlying star. Despite the seemingly random dabs and strokes of color, these details form an intrinsic unity, creating a flowing equilibrium and confirming the interconnection of all matter.
The power of Eltanin Portal seized another viewer in the gallery through the portrayal of the portal itself. The circular entry wavers between the impact of an alternate dimensional experience and the Zen form of ensō, an organic, manually executed circle that expresses meditation in motion. The painting is named for the star Eltanin, standing for the dragon in Arabic. It’s no surprise that Eltanin’s longer name, Gamma Draconis, also references the dragon, that exists within the constellation known as Draco. Living within the rich blue depth of Song’s cosmos, the accumulation of each of these meanings resonates with dragon force.
Like the diptych or seasonal quadtych of Chinese ink paintings, Solaris 3 and Solaris 4 are treated as a set. Evoking the calming spatial format and tonal colors of hanging scrolls matted with complementary brocade, both paintings are composed of panels of soft colors and framing lines. In the ink painting tradition, nature is typically depicted with a Daoist representation of diminished human presence against the prevailing existence of nature. The Solaris pair portrays nature through the vitality of the sun built up in heated yellows and oranges; looking into these suns—or even one-in-the-same sun composed of the ever-changing movement of molecules—the thermal energy spills off the canvas.
The show also features some earlier paintings, such as Aura, that emit a far more tender energy. Gentle rose hues instinctually transform into strips of lavenders that encase a warmer purple core. Here the heart is protected, excised of external forces, acting upon us by protecting us from vulnerabilities, warming our own core and fostering a sense of support. Similarly, a bird’s eye view of pastels embracing and touching their warmer tones in Spirit Garden seems to add up to everything that we could ideally imagine as a “spirit garden”—where we can pause, exhale and rejuvenate within the garden’s reverberations of peace and interconnection.
Indeed, if you devote time to experiencing each painting, the expressions of color vibrate with different frequencies. Those who are intuitively attracted to his work often describe that they react to a particular painting with physiological effect—like a gut feeling. In physics, this transfer of vibrative energy between objects is referred to as sympathetic resonance. Having received responses on the communicative impact of his work, Song recounts stories of their effect on two individuals in the latter stages of fatal illness.
In both cases, he was informed how transformative and healing his paintings had been for the person approaching their time of passage. One individual bought the painting as a way of saying goodbye to his spouse and leaving something of himself with her. After his passing, the spouse wrote to Song noting that his painting captivated both her and her husband and brought them together. The other individual cleared her room except for Song’s painting that hung on the wall opposite her bed so she could view it while bedridden in the last stage of her life.
Song tends to beauty, hope and possibility through his visual fields of energy, allowing us to pause, exhale and inhale, and recalibrate our own energy. When you separate from Song’s paintings and pass back over the threshold into Pioneer Square, consider thanking ArtX Contemporary’s curators on your way out for perceiving the intrinsic value of Song’s work. If you are fortunate enough to encounter the artist as well, try offering gratitude for the transfer of energy that William Song offers through Draco Arising.
William Song’s show Draco Arising runs through July 26th at ArtX Contemporary, 512 First Avenue South, Seattle.
