Paula
Griff

Paula Griff has known she was an artist since the age of six. A Pacific Northwest landscape painter, she earned her Fine Arts degree from The Evergreen State College in Olympia and trained at the Marchutz School of Painting and Drawing in Aix-en-Provence, France, where she received the Frank Benny Memorial Prize for excellence in painting. Her work is held in public and private collections across the United States, Canada, France, and Japan.

Her color is bold and fresh, carrying a tangible texture — a sense of place and home built through both gesture and stroke. Griff paints as an indirect response to the elements: she sketches en plein air, then returns to the studio, where introspection carries the motif beyond observation and the landscape is left to speak for itself. With the Pacific Northwest in her own bones and blood, she finds color even in the most monochromatic and subdued scenes, and movement in the life that Nature embodies.

Her subjects range from the valleys and waterscapes of Orcas Island to her home surroundings on Bainbridge — West Blakely, a south slope amongst hundred-year-old apple trees, where the ferries motor through Rich Passage below. That sense of place is the ground she paints from. She recently closed Belltown Design, her full-service Seattle interior design firm, to give herself fully to the work.

Griff’s career reflects a lifelong commitment to the arts — to artists with disabilities, to public art, and to curating exhibitions. She has led en plein air workshops and guided groups through the museums of Paris, and her art history courses in France — the 19th Century and Impressionism, and Cézanne and Van Gogh — were taught through the eye of a working painter. Iconic Bainbridge at JG Art Gallery welcomed her as an invited guest artist from July 3 through August 6, 2026.