Iconic Bainbridge
Artists and artworks that call Bainbridge home — or that the island called into being.
14 works. Their colours, measured.
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.
The show moved to Bainbridge Homes Real Estate.
Every Bainbridge show rotates next door after it closes at 176 Winslow Way; the works stay on view and sales continue at the gallery.
Gary Groves
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.
The artist’s page →
Pamela Wachtler
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.
25 MPH · $300
Arrival · $450
Bainbridge Vineyards · $275
Balancing Act · $350
Blue Skies Ahead (Bloedel Reserve) · $2,000
By The Light of The Moon · $375
Kathe Fraga
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.
A Beautiful Blue Morning · $300
A Blush Of Roses · $2,500
A Celebration of Spring #1 · $650
A Study in Color · $2,500
Afternoon In The Garden · $5,000
Alice’s bedroom Wall II · $650
Wendy Armstrong
Painting · Multidisciplinary · Invited · The island as subject
The artist’s page →
Erica Nordean
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.
The artist’s page →
Paula Griff
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.
The artist’s page →
Teresa Smith
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.
The artist’s page →
Brooke Borcherding
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.
Beach Eye View · $2,600
Beauty Before Dark · $950
Blackbird Bakery · $950
Center For Wooden Boats · $2,800
Eagle Harbour · $1,200
Ferry Land No.4 · $1,2508 painters, hung as a wall.
Each work sits at its own proportion and takes the wall its size deserves; the painters cluster as they would in the room.
Every piece in the show.
All 15 works in the show; the ones that found homes are marked. Worldwide shipping is hand-coordinated.