Paula
Griff

Paula Griff was born in Seattle in 1956. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from The Evergreen State College in Olympia and trained in fine arts and art history at The Marchutz School of Painting and Drawing in Aix-en-Provence, France, where she later taught and received the Frank Benny Memorial Prize for excellence in painting. She has taught painting, drawing and art history — workshops, classes, retreats and individual instruction for all abilities — in Washington and Oregon.

Her practice is oil on canvas, graphite on paper, and watercolor and gouache: lively brushwork, textural application, landscape. The process is plein air and nature sketching followed by studio painting — engaging what the American painter Elaine de Kooning called “the wordless part of the brain.” Her palette is broad and saturated color, bold brushstrokes. Her subjects are the Pacific Northwest landscape — Bainbridge Island and Orcas Island — and the landscape of the South of France around Aix-en-Provence.

Her work is in the public collections of First Interstate Bank (Seattle), the Lambiel Museum (Eastsound, WA), Seal, Daigle and Ross (New Orleans), DBK and Associates (Seattle) and Mercer, Meidinger & Hansen (Seattle), and in private collections in the United States, Europe and Japan since 1989. She has been published in the Musée Granet exhibition catalog for the Cézanne retrospective in Aix-en-Provence, and reviewed in The Seattle Times, Soundings Northwest, Art in America, the Annual Guide to Artists, The Jewish Transcript and the Anacortes American; her paintings have appeared as cover art for Windermere Real Estate.

From 2010 to 2025 she was principal and founder of Belltown Design LLC, an interior design firm; from 1987 to 1992 she was artistic director of Artists Unlimited, a non-profit arts organization for artists with disabilities. She has worked abroad in Provence, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Croatia, Slovenia and Montenegro; in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands and Bristol Bay; and in Mexico, Canada, Colombia and Thailand. Iconic Bainbridge at JG Art Gallery welcomed her in July 2026; she is now on the gallery’s permanent roster.