Paul Polson

Paul Polson, born and raised in Wyoming, has worked as a studio painter for more than five decades — and, on a parallel track, as one of the country's pioneers of monumental inflatable sculpture for the stage. He earned his BA in art education from the University of Wyoming in 1970, spent fifteen years as a studio artist in San Diego with graduate work at San Diego State and UC San Diego, then in 1988 moved to Pioneer Square in Seattle, where he painted in a warehouse for three years before settling in Poulsbo and later Kitsap County.

For more than twenty years, alongside the painting practice, Polson designed and fabricated inflatable sculpture and scenic sets through his company Big Air Productions — including a sixty-foot snail for Cirque du Soleil, work for Radio City, and a touring set for the Broadway production of Cats. He has been a guest lecturer at the University of Washington, Northwest College of Art & Design, West Sound Academy, and Northwind Arts Center in Port Townsend.

In 2018, looking for a fresh landscape, Polson moved to Astoria, Oregon and opened a ground-floor studio gallery on Tenth Street, near the Columbia River. His current work — the Astoria Bridge and the working tankers under it, Saddle Mountain, the Tillamook Head Lighthouse, the Astoria Riverwalk — is rendered in oil and arrives at the iconic from a painter's, not a tourist's, angle. His strata series layers styles within a single canvas to hold complex ecological themes — including the modern dependence on oil — in visual form. Earlier work was the subject of a 2019 exhibition at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Paul Polson: Out Here and Strata.