I paint for the feeling. The color is how I get there.
Hi, I’m Kristy —
A Pacific Northwest artist, photographer, and graphic designer who has been making things her whole life.
My grandfather was a painter. His work hung throughout the house I grew up in, and his birds were everywhere — distinctive, slightly stylized, full of character. I didn’t realize until I was well into my own practice how deeply those paintings had taken root in me. When I started painting birds myself, they came out with the same spirit: not strictly realistic, not fully abstract, but unmistakably themselves. My birds are mine now — evolved through my own eye and palette and process — but the lineage runs straight back to him.
I work primarily in acrylics on canvas. My subjects wander — I’ll spend weeks on florals, then pivot to abstracts because something I saw on a walk demanded it. What stays consistent is color. Bold, sometimes unexpected, always intentional. I want the work to have presence.
My studio is in the Pacific Northwest, which means I live with dramatic skies, evergreen forests, and light that changes personality three times before noon. You’ll see all of that in the work — even in the pieces that don’t look like landscapes at all.
Artist Photo
Artist Statement
“My work begins with color — not subject matter. I start by asking what energy I want to make visible, and then I find the image that holds it. A flower becomes a way to talk about abundance. A bird in stillness becomes a meditation on attention. An abstract becomes an honest record of a mood I couldn’t name any other way.”
Those birds carry particular weight for me. My grandfather painted birds with a distinctive hand — a style all his own — and I grew up looking at them without knowing I was being shaped by them. My own birds have evolved: my palette, my marks, my interpretation. But the spirit of what he did is there. It’s the part of painting that feels least like craft and most like inheritance.
My goal is always the same: to make something that has genuine feeling in it. I want someone to look at one of my paintings and feel something shift — a little brightness, a little stillness, a little more awake to the color around them.
Studio Photo
Beyond the Easel
Painting isn’t my only creative language. I’m also a photographer — I’ve spent years capturing the Pacific Northwest landscape, and that eye for light and composition feeds directly into my painting practice. I also do graphic design work, which means I think about how images inhabit space, how color relationships work at scale, and how a visual story lands for the person receiving it.
All of it is connected. The painter, the photographer, the designer — they share the same eye.
About This Shop
I offer two ways to bring the work home. Original paintings are one-of-a-kind, hand-painted pieces — when they’re gone, they’re gone. Art prints and products bring the same imagery to prints, canvases, mugs, notebooks, apparel, and more, made to order at a price point that makes art accessible to everyone.
