Top 50 Seattle Artists and their Featured Art

I was born and raised in coastal North Florida and received my Bachelor of Arts from the University of North Florida where I studied Art History and Painting. An avid hiker and backpacker, I find inspiration in wild places and my current practice is centered around the exploration of the intersectionality between the spiritual and earthbound in the form of abstracted landscape paintings. I live with my husband in Mount Vernon, Washington, a small town nestled in the Skagit Valley between the North Cascades mountains and the Salish Sea.

Kristi Nakata (she/her) is a Yonsei (fourth generation) Japanese American fiber artist born and raised in the Seattle area, on Duwamish and Coast Salish land. Kristi creates macraweave wall hangings combining techniques of macramé and weaving. Inspired by the beauty of the Pacific Northwest, she creates mountainscapes and abstract interpretations of the colors of our region. Her macramé products include checkered bags, coasters, keychains, plant hangers, wall hangings, and more. Kristi's artistic journey began with oil painting and watercolor, and she dabbled in many arts and crafts forms until she found fiber arts. During the day, she works in nonprofit communications and marketing.

Claire began her creative journey in the performing arts. At a young age, she knew she would never play sports or join the chess team, Claire was a fierce creative who dove into every avenue of creativity possible. First finding her voice through singing and dance, she ventured into acting and guitar to fulfil creative itch. The desire to be on stage only blossomed as Claire embarked on her collegiate journey as an acting major. During her time at university, Claire was drawn to the movement heavy classes where the focus was on creating emotion and story through the movement of our bodies and breath. This curiosity in the unspoken took ahold of her and she began to explore the visual arts for the first time. Claire Received her BFA in acting in 2019 and took the leap to explore what it would look like to be a visual artist. The knowledge of performing arts informed her practice now and allowed her to understand the creative process from a professional prospective and to bring her passion for movement into a different medium. Since graduating, Claire has shown at numerous art fairs throughout the south and western Washington, opened an online platform, and has had exhibitions in Georgetown and Seattle with the West Seattle Art Walk.

Lauren is a self-taught printmaker raised in California and currently living in Seattle, Washington. Since 2020, she has been creating small linocut block prints. Lauren is a fourth-generation Japanese American, and she uses her artwork as a creative outlet to connect with and explore her heritage. Many of her pieces draw inspiration from Japanese culture and imagery. She draws additional inspiration from the natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest and her many hikes and backpacking trips in the area.

I grew up in small dairy towns north of Seattle surrounded by nature and animals. It was pretty remote, before the internet and with little access to TV. A lot of my friends didn't have it at all. Writing, reading, music, sports, crafts, and hanging outside was what we did. I was gifted a Polariod camera one year and promptly put up a photograph on my bedroom door, proclaiming my new business as a photographer. My dad gifted me his old analog camera shortly afterward, I think I was about 10. My parents had a business doing patent drawings digitally that later developed into a graphic design business in the 90s. This was when very few people had computers and the tech industry in the city was just getting going. My mother always had horses and got into breeding Warmbloods. So often weekends were either spent doing chores and repairs around the house or on the road to shows, always with a camera in hand. I was a valedictorian at my high school and went to the liberal arts school Whitman College, not really sure what I wanted to do as a career. I studied Philosophy, but was always taking an art class (or two) each semester, just to keep me sane in the academia world. It wasn't until my junior year when I realized that art was it for me. Another year there and I would have double majored but I settled for just the art minor and the decision that pursuing art and making would become my lifelong focus. Through the years my work has taken many forms. It began as a way to educate myself more since I didn't go to art school. Drawing, photography, printmaking, graphic design, illustration, paper making, textile design are some of the mediums I've dappled with but painting is number one now. My process is personal and intuitive. Art and making are still incredibly grounding and painting is my favorite way to get clear on unconscious motives and feelings. It helps me to connect, and be present to innate knowledge that we all carry around within but may not be aware of. In doing so, my work can be raw, emotional and energetic yet also beautiful and contained. We are all of these things.

Perry is a woodturning artist living in Seattle, Washington. He began his woodturning journey in 2018. Perry is passionate about trees and forests and--in an effort to honor the beauty of trees--works almost entirely with wood from storm-fallen or diseased trees. Perry uses a lathe to make bowls, lidded boxes and other wood products but his passion and main focus is hollow form vessels (vases). Since 2018, Perry has made a few thousand vessels . Simplicity is his focus and he aims to create beautiful forms that incorporate some of the figure, knots and imperfections of the trees with which he works.

Elisa is an artist of Puerto Rican descent born and raised in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia, and currently living in Seattle. She grew up between two cultures and languages. She uses her art practice as a way to explore this middle ground, this duality of belonging to two different cultures yet not fully fitting into either one. Along with her ancestry and cultural background, she is inspired by feminine figures, memories, and the natural world.

I live and work in the Seattle area. Inspired by the complex dynamic between humans and the surrounding world, my paintings remind us of the powerful capacity of nature’s beauty to transform the self. I present a fluid, multifaceted experience that mirrors our own interactions with place and time. The layering of multiple perspectives invites the viewer to see the world through shifting lenses of time, scale, and space. Painted in acrylic on canvas, the work is often heavily textured in places, with layers of acrylic paint, fabric, natural materials, and paper. I studied art at the University of Washington and teach art in the area. My work is in numerous collections around the US and abroad. Enid is represented by the Seattle Art Museum Sales Gallery.