You can see Cable Griffith's new paintings at G. Gibson Gallery. For several years, Seattle artist Cable Griffith has been experimenting with patterned landscapes that appear to be made of stacked candies or heaps of tires, dystopic lollipop planets. Sometimes elements have been loose and floating in air. Other times the scenes are so tightly assembled that they'd make perfect bright factory-knitted sweaters. (Actually, Cable Griffith's paintings would make fairly tremendous sweaters.)

The new paintings branch out in ways I'm finding fascinating to think about. Video games are merging with ancient texts. The painting above is Frogger and Florida (or California?) roadside and pre-modern Egypt. Below: Mad Lib hieroglyphics.

Here's the view from an airplane window, looking down through cartoonish clouds on Griffith's building-block-Minecrafty, vaguely Simpsons-colored world.

A rippled painting called Dock has its own faint sonic echo. Its dual orientation—aerial, but straight-on, too—brings to my brain the Google Earthishness of Indian miniature painting and Mondrian's earliest experiments with abstraction: piers and oceans made of storms of hash marks.

For a while I've seen some Adam Sorensen and Susanna Bluhm in Griffith's paintings (World Two Overview), and at last night's opening I noticed a little Whiting Tennis, too, and a little Jeremy Mangan. Last week, I saw some similarly bright 2013 paintings swirling with solid stenciled forms by Peter Gross. Did Seattle become a painting town while nobody was looking?

See more recommended art shows right here.