Riley Waite (b. 1992) is an Irish American oil painter working in Portland, Oregon. He received his BFA in Drawing and Painting from California State University, Long Beach in 2019. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and he was shortlisted for the Zurich Portrait Prize in 2021 and the Jackson’s Art Prize in 2023. Working primarily in oil, Waite explores memory, place, and shifting ideas of home through narrative figuration and atmospheric space.
 

"My work explores the tension between instability and the persistent desire for optimism. Expanding on earlier narrative paintings centered on memory and place, recent works construct dreamlike environments where beauty and threat exist simultaneously. Figures move through luminous fields of color and hazy, digitally inflected landscapes that suggest both refuge and unease.
 

Using photographs and sketches gathered from lived experience, I collage fragments into carefully staged compositions. Saturated gradients, blooming light, and references to early screen based aesthetics function as emotional filters, softening or obscuring imagery that hints at rupture, violence, or uncertainty. These atmospheres draw on Romantic traditions of psychological landscape while engaging contemporary visual culture.
 

Rather than resolving contradiction, the paintings dwell within it. They ask whether optimism can be rehearsed through image making, and whether beauty might operate not as denial, but as a counterforce to the weight of the present."

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