Art by Bridgette

The design wraps the whole shoreline around the animal. A poured Puget Sound runs along the lower body and a green bluff along the back, planted with what actually grows up there. Kinnikinnick carries most of it, low and evergreen and stubborn against salt wind, the way it really grows at Kayu Kayu Ac, threaded through with western redcedar, salal, and red alder.

Kinnikinnick is the anchor, and not arbitrarily. The park at the bottom of my hill is called Kayu Kayu Ac, an anglicized spelling of the Lushootseed k̓ayuk̓ayuac, which means kinnikinnick plant. The word is the berry, k̓ayuk̓ayu, plus the suffix -ac, plant. Shoreline chose it in 2009 on the advice of Edith Nelson, a Duwamish elder who lives in Richmond Beach.

The park at the bottom of my hill is named after the plant.

It was a reasonable thing to name it after. When T. T. Waterman mapped Indigenous place names along this shore in 1916, he recorded a kinnikinnick gathering site on this stretch of it. The plant grew here in quantity, and people came for it.

I grew up around kinnikinnick in Richmond Beach and have watched it move through its life cycle year after year. It is still growing in the same places. Painting the orca in it is not a decorative choice about a native plant. It is the name of the park at the bottom of my hill, painted onto the animal that swims past it.

A traditional canoe runs low along the waterline at the front of the animal, and a log cabin sits in the pectoral fin behind it. The canoe belongs to the people who have been on this water the longest, and the cabin to the ones who came after. The orca carries them both along the same stretch of shore, under the same plants, above the same water.

How it will be painted

Two techniques, meeting at the waterline, which is where they meet in life too. The lower body is poured acrylic, the same method behind my pour paintings, let loose so the blues move the way water does. The bluff above is built in thinned acrylic glazes over white primer, layered transparently so the leaves and berries hold the luminosity of watercolor while staying inside a system built to survive ten years outdoors. Color is built up rather than laid down, so the white of the primer keeps working through the greens from underneath.

I mostly paint gardens, water views, nature, and life at sea. I keep coming back to watercoloring the season I am in and whatever it happens to be producing. Foliage, plants, flowers, energy, produce, trees, herbs.

I paint because it lets my shoulders relax and my mind calm down. My artwork is for me first. I am not tied to how a viewer feels in front of it. People deserve the freedom to feel however they want, whether that is excitement, joy, calm, confusion, or nothing at all. Letting go of expectations about other people's feelings is part of the practice.

Watercolor glides onto the paper and moves with freedom to wherever the color wants to land. Acrylic runs smooth over a canvas and layers beautifully, and I reach for palette knives and popsicle sticks alongside brushes to get it to do what I want. When I watercolor I sketch first in graphite, then lay in pigment with a gentle water brush. Last, I like helping a painting pop off the page with a bit of black ink, highlighting a leaf or a flower petal here and there.

I avoid painting people. I take on too much of their mood when I do, good or bad, and I cannot seem to turn it off.

I learned to really see in 2024, when I started watercoloring at Cole Art Gallery. The class gathers around a big table and brings in pieces of nature to work from. Plants, flowers, foliage, fungi, branches, bouquets, anything you find in your garden. You hold the thing. You sit close to it. Then you stand up and step back and take inventory of the colors, the shapes, the energy. There is no deadline and no grade. That class gave me the space to be patient with what I saw, and to wait a little longer to look for more.

Over the past five years my work has become softer and more feminine, and it has moved from large canvases to small watercolor sketchbook journals. I spend every day at my studio. There is no typical order to the day. Some days I paint five paintings. Some paintings take me five years.

I am a painter in Richmond Beach. My grandparents moved to this neighborhood in 1961 and raised my dad here, and my father first brought me down to Richmond Beach Saltwater Park in 1988, when I was five. That was also the year of my first art lesson, scraping black oil pastel off a page to let a rainbow underneath come through. I knew then that I was an artist.

I studied fine art at Shoreline Community College, earning an AA in 2006 and an AFA in 2012 with an emphasis on painting. I work in acrylic, watercolor, and gouache on canvas, wood, and paper. My work has been shown publicly in Shoreline, Edmonds and Seattle, and hangs in private collections in Washington, on Maui, and in Todos Santos, Mexico.

In 1994, as a sixth grader, I pressed my palm into a slab of clay for a school mural so that anyone who needed a hand to hold could stop at that wall and lay theirs over mine. It was my first piece of public art, and it is still the measure I use.