Now open · July 2 through August 6

Iconic Bainbridge

Art rooted in Bainbridge Island · July 2 — August 6, 2026

Teresa Smith · Grand Forest · Oil on Canvas · 48 × 36 in

The exhibition

The island as subject, studio, and sanctuary.

Not a headcount show. The artists here share one thing: Bainbridge Island shaped them, or they shaped it, or both. Some live on the island. Some have given it sustained attention over decades. All have made work that could only come from this place — woodcut printed here, oil and print made from its light, oil on canvas that finds the forest as cathedral, ceramic fired with the same intensity the island demands.

Iconic Bainbridge opens with this group and stays open to others. The island is the argument. The roster follows the argument.

The artists

The artists. The island. The work.

Gary Groves

Woodcut and linocut · Photography · Bainbridge Island

Groves is a master printmaker working from Bainbridge Island. He cuts very finely detailed woodblocks — often with Dremel tools — into tonal, predominantly black-and-white prints drawn from nature; a single block can take a week or more to carve. The prints consolidate a wide-ranging practice across sculpture, ceramics, photography, painting, and architecture, all of it now brought to bear on the block.

Bainbridge Island. The subject of a retrospective at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art. Decades of work across multiple media, consolidated in fine-detail woodblock printmaking.

Gary's full page Inquire about a work

Pamela Wachtler

Oil on canvas · Monotype · Bainbridge Island

Wachtler took a BFA from Moore College of Art and Design in 1972 and moved to the Pacific Northwest in 1977. Twenty-five years as a commercial designer and illustrator sharpened her composition and her sense of how an image holds attention before a viewer has decided to look. Turning full-time to fine art, she made the natural world of Bainbridge Island her subject: its birds, marshes, harbor light, and majestic trees.

Bainbridge Island. BFA, Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, 1972. Solo exhibition “Impressions of Place” at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art. Works in oil and monotype.

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Kathe Fraga

Antiqued fresco on birch panel · Oil glaze · Chinoiserie

Fraga's subject and structure is chinoiserie — the European decorative tradition that invented a fantasy version of China across wallpaper, lacquer, silk, and porcelain. Her contribution is the surface: layers built up on birch panel and glazed to read like an aged fresco, a wall recovered rather than a picture made. The MET's 2015 “China: Through the Looking Glass” informed her 2017 collaboration with Clé de Peau Beauté.

Pacific Northwest. Antiqued-fresco technique on birch panel with oil glaze. 2017 collaboration with Clé de Peau Beauté following the MET's “China: Through the Looking Glass.” kathefraga.com.

Kathe's full page Inquire about a work

Teresa Smith

Oil on canvas · Abstract landscape · Pacific Northwest

Smith paints the Pacific Northwest forest as interior space — cathedral trees, filtered light, the canopy as ceiling, the forest floor as ground. Grand Forest (48 × 36 in, oil on canvas) arrives from her studio for the show. The work is abstract in method and specific in place: the paint records what attention finds in density, in layered light, in the weight of old growth. The trees are unmistakably trees. Everything else is inquiry.

Pacific Northwest. Oil on canvas, abstract landscape. Instagram: @teresasmithart. teresasmith.com. Part of the JG Art Gallery invited program.

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Wendy Armstrong

Painting · Multidisciplinary · Invited · The island as subject

Armstrong is the show's native voice — a Bainbridge Island artist whose five-decade practice has moved through stone, forged steel, cast and etched glass, ceramics, and wood before returning to paint. For Iconic Bainbridge she takes the island itself as subject: a garden truck, three sheep in a field, the long shadow of a working day. The pictures read plainly and reward a close look, the way a maker's eye records what it has lived beside.

Bainbridge Island. Founding member, Kitsap County 1% for Arts Commission. Etched-glass commissions held by Tiffany & Co. and made by invitation for the Legion of Honor's Monet exhibition; her co-designed fourteen-foot steel sculpture “Three Trees” stands at Centennial Park, Poulsbo. Four first-place juried awards, Bellevue Art Museum; Bainbridge Island Museum of Art Juried Spotlight, 2023.

Wendy's full page Inquire about a work

Erica Nordean

Ceramic sculpture · Raku and unglazed ceramic · Invited

Nordean brings ceramic sculpture to the show — raku-fired, unglazed, and glazed ceramic forms mounted in resin and wood stands. The titles are mythic and equine: Freya, Equus Moon, Astronomy, Raku 1. A painter by primary career, she works in acrylic with the same intensity she brings to clay — allowing the material to do what it does. The ceramic pieces reflect a state of being rather than illustrate a subject.

Pacific Northwest. Painter and ceramic sculptor. Former exercise rider at Longacres and Emerald Downs. Studio: studionorde.com. Part of the JG Art Gallery invited program.

Erica's full page Inquire about a work

Paula Griff

Oil and graphite · Pacific Northwest landscape · Invited

Griff paints the island the way someone paints a home they have just chosen. A Pacific Northwest landscape painter trained between Olympia and Aix-en-Provence, she sketches en plein air — the ferries through Rich Passage, a smoke tree turning crimson, a stand of Japanese maples in full autumn — then carries the motif back to the studio, where introspection lets the landscape speak for itself. Her color is bold and fresh with a tangible texture, found even in the most subdued and monochromatic scenes, and the work holds the movement and the life she sees in nature.

Bainbridge Island (West Blakely). Fine Arts, The Evergreen State College; trained at the Marchutz School of Painting and Drawing in Aix-en-Provence, France, and awarded the Frank Benny Memorial Prize for excellence in painting. Work held in public and private collections across the United States, Canada, France, and Japan. Part of the JG Art Gallery invited program.

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Brooke Borcherding

Oil on canvas · Bainbridge Island marina and harbor light

Borcherding paints the working water of Bainbridge Island — marinas, harbor slips, ferry landings — as fields of bold, saturated color. Mast lines, hull reflections, and dock geometry become planes of light before resolving back into a place. The island’s waterfront holds in oil the way memory holds a familiar view: abstracted, luminous, unmistakably here.

Bainbridge Island. Long-standing program at JG Art Gallery. Island marina, harbor, and waterfront as primary subject across a sustained body of work in oil on canvas.

Brooke’s full page Inquire about a work

Where to see it

One show. Two cities. Worldwide.

Bainbridge Island

Opening night July 2, 5–8 PM. Artists and works rooted in Bainbridge Island. Gallery hours: Wednesday through Sunday, 12–5 PM, through August 6.

Park City

2078 Prospector Avenue. Selected works traveling with the show. Park City rooms hold the installation through the end of July.

Online

The full show in the Iconic Bainbridge Viewing Room — every work documented, all artists' statements in their own voice, available to collectors anywhere.

Walk through the show. Or write to us.

Iconic Bainbridge opens July 2 and runs through August 6. Opening night reception July 2, 5–8 PM, Bainbridge Island. Bainbridge gallery: Wednesday through Sunday, 12–5 PM. Park City by appointment. Every artist's page and available works are online. Inquiries answered personally, usually same business day.

Plan a visit Walk the Viewing Room Inquire about the exhibition