Ericka Wolf

Ericka Wolf was born and lives in Seattle. She studied at the Gage Academy of Art in Seattle, and continued her training at the New York Academy of Art and Grand Central Atelier — two institutions associated with rigorous figurative training in the classical tradition. The academic grounding shows in the discipline of her watercolor work even when the subject matter moves toward abstraction.

She cites a range of influences that span photography and painting: the color field painters Jules Olitski, Mark Rothko, and Helen Frankenthaler, and the photographers Eric Cahan, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Debra Bloomfield. The cross-medium reference is not incidental — Wolf's watercolors operate in the atmospheric territory between those two practices, the color field's interest in pure chromatic experience meeting the photographer's attention to light as a subject in itself.