Ivan Colin is a professional visual artist based in Bellingham, Washington. He was inspired early by the graffiti culture and markings etched on walls in his hometown, Napa Valley, California. Just a short drive away, the murals of San Francisco and Oakland left a lasting impression, with massive walls transformed into free outdoor galleries that had his imagination in awe.

Even with that early inspiration, Colin didn’t believe art could be a real career. He went to Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon, to play collegiate soccer and study Business Marketing. But the pursuit felt empty, and he lacked the enthusiasm to stay in class. In search of something that he could do for a lifetime, he found himself pulled into the art department. Surrounded by other artists and guided by inspiring professors, his doubts began to diminish. What started with graffiti letters evolved into fluid, abstract, and organic paintings, marking the start of his lifelong journey as an artist.

Ivan draws inspiration from dynamic movement, fluidity, and forms found in nature. He works as a full-time artist creating murals for businesses. Proudly married to Sarah and father to Romy.

Jason Allen LaClair (Sienum) is a Coast Salish artist from the Lummi Nation/Nooksack, descended from multiple Pacific Northwest tribes. Growing up around master carvers, he began practicing Northwest art at age 9, initially focusing on Northern Formline style. Following elder guidance, he now creates exclusively in his ancestral Coast Salish style. His breakthrough 2021 project "Salmon Run" spans 700 feet on Bellingham's N. Forest Street. LaClair creates murals throughout Bellingham, Whatcom County, and the San Juan Islands, honoring his people's sacred relationship with the land and waters.

Ryan Henry Ward, known as Henry, is an inspirational artist born in Bozeman, Montana in 1975 and raised on a farm. After moving to the Pacific Northwest, he developed his distinctive illustrative style characterized by bold color palettes, confident brushstrokes, and compositional mastery. These qualities have established him as a rising star in the art world. Ward is renowned for creating over 500 murals and an extensive collection of canvas paintings that adorn public spaces, businesses, and private homes, inspiring thousands daily through his vibrant artistic vision.

A. Cyaltsa Finkbonner, a Lummi tribal member, was born and raised on the Lummi reservation. She grew up commercial fishing during the summers in the San Juan Islands. While preparing the boat for the salmon season, she was introduced to welding by one of her dads, the late Larry Kinley. “You should look into welding,” he suggested.  “They say that women make good welders with their steady hands.” That sparked her interest so much that she decided to attend technical college for welding. After becoming a certified welder, she joined the apprenticeship for the Ironworkers Union in Seattle, WA. She welded on buildings in WA and in Hawaii. She also worked at the navy shipyard in Bremerton for two years. Although she loves welding, her heart is with her art: painting with acrylics, drawing, graphic design, silk screening, videography, photography. In 2001, she graduated from the Art Institute of Seattle with an AA in multimedia. Since then, she’s been building her own business, Creative Cuzzin. You can learn more at CreativeCuzzin.com 

ALL OUR RELATIONS sculpture was created for Se’Si’Le’s 2023 Indigenous-led Journey and Snake River Campaign to restore healthy and abundant populations of salmon by removing the Snake River dams. The sculpture was a collaboration between Cyaltsa and master carver, Jewell James. “It came to me in a dream,” Jewell explains. 

After sketching out the overall concept of it’s structure, Cyaltsa went to work on the details in the art and installation creations.

Andrew Johnson carries the ancestral name Tsow-Met. He is a talented Cosalish flute musician and proud member of the Lummi Nation. Flute making is a big part of his journey aside his playing. Creating and listening with his third ear which he was taught by his elders his heart. Deeply connected to his heritage, he weaves the ancient sounds of the flute with stories and teachings from his people. Raised with a profound respect for his ancestors and the natural world, Tsow-Met’s music reflects the spirit and resilience of who he is and his pride for his people. Through his performances and recordings, he shares the healing power of traditional Native American music, inviting listeners to connect with the land, their roots, and each other. The message he carries through his journey is preservation: protecting and promoting what is left of the sound of balance and love through his playing and making of flutes. His real message is what are we leaving for the children? That’s the real question. 

Artist Diego Fidelis lives in Washington State, in the beautiful Pacific Northwest, where nature is so inspiring. Born in Brazil, art and music have always stirred in his blood since he can remember. As a child, he drew on a big bright blue Formica table that his family had in the kitchen. He filled this table with his drawings every day. The table was cleaned by his mom every night, ensuring he would always have a blank canvas for the next day to let his creativity flow in the child’s universe: imagination and freedom. This must be the reason his favorite color is blue after looking at this table for many years! As a self-taught musician he remembers that even as a young kid he appreciated and paid attention to the sounds, rhythms and melodies in a song. As a teen he played his first instrument: drums. After that he expanded into one of the most complex and rich sounds: the piano, learning to play by ear.  His sensitivity to music has a big influence in his unique way to play with the lines where they dance with freedom and infinity creating sounds and rhythms through the paint brushes. With a striking geometric style and bold colors, he finds inspiration in the shapes he sees in nature, animals, and architecture. It is captivating, as it takes your eyes on a fun journey finding some hidden figures and objects in his acrylic paintings.  

A bit of Sunspot's origin story:

I’m drawn to the way our environments shape our emotional experience. Through my work, I aim to create pieces that feel grounding, joyful, and empowering.

Art is a way to commemorate meaningful moments and relationships as well. It’s an honor to create work that becomes part of people’s homes, work environments, and personal histories.

​My connection to the arts began with paper-cut collages along with pyrography (wood burning). Later, I earned a Visual Communications degree, took wood shop classes, and learned how to work a CNC laser engraver at The Bellingham Foundry Makerspace. During these experiences, I fell in love with the creative freedom of combining hands-on styles with new technologies and then creating the Sunspot Series.

Why “Sunspot”? I grew up in southern New Mexico, and my favorite memories come from adventures at my family's shared cabin off Sunspot Highway in NM's Sacramento Mountains.  Riding horses, building tree forts, cooking around the campfire, storytelling, getting lost in the woods with our dogs... my most grounding memories come from being outside and swallowing up everything nature has to offer.

In 1995, my family and I moved to Bellingham, Washington.  “Where the forest meets the ocean”, my mom says.  Here in Washington, we traded in our horses for bikes, sailboats, and running shoes.  Although the move was a worthy family decision, it wasn't the easiest transition for me.  Yet gave my love for the outdoors and the arts whole new levels of meaning and inspiration.

Northwest mixed media artist Paul Niemi rekindled his childhood love affair with visual art in 2008 when he began creating hand-painted wire mesh and paper-mache masks representing relics from an alternate universe. The work was heavily influenced by his love of theatre, folk art, and the A.D.D.-induced quirky and unusual notebook margin doodles that he recalls drawing while a high school student. The mental excursions, which were often seen as breaks from the boredom of the classroom, earned Niemi superior grades and the ability to create clean and interesting lines, designs, and characters.

His current mixed media work reflects Niemi's critical eye, steady hand, sharp wit, and unique perspective. In his drawings, scratchboards, and paintings, nothing is ever what it seems. The spectator must consider all angles of a piece to fully see it.  Niemi loves to make social commentary in his works, but, more often than not, his practice takes him to an even deeper place. When he creates, Niemi remains open to impulse and yields to the surrealism of the psyche that guides the pen, implement or brush.

The arty fish stuff and fishy art stuff on this site is the work of Tom Crestodina, an Alaska fisherman who began making cutaway drawings in 2011 to connect with his young son Franio while he was at sea.

"When I went back to fishing for the first time after my son was born, I missed my family so much it was like physical pain. Any father who has been to sea knows that feeling. Making these drawings was my way of dealing with it, and reaching out to my little boy."

For almost four decades, Patricia Missler called the island of Hawaii home. During those years, she immersed herself in all things artistic, including painting and writing. She and her husband, also an artist, created, curated, and operated their own art gallery in Kona, Hawaii, for sixteen years. They also designed and built their own house and extensive gardens, tucked away in a native Hawaiian forest, further expressing their creative energy.

It was there, in Hawaii, that Patricia unleashed her creative nature and actively pursued studies with many revered, successful, and creative artists. She is well known for her large abstracts and also her vibrant and whimsical watercolor paintings. Her collectors are now all over the world.

However, after this long adventure on the Islands, it was time for a new perspective. Patricia and her husband now reside in the Pacific Northwest.

“My new surroundings offer a place of rest, retreat, and a fresh source of inspiration. My painting and writing are now infused with the hues of the PNW, my new home.”

Since moving, Patricia’s work has been featured at Chuckanut Bay Gallery, Cordata Gallery (formerly known as Gallery Syre), and at the cultural Story Pole Fundraiser at The Hotel Leo in Bellingham, WA. Most recently, Patricia was one of five Whatcom artists invited to create original works of art to accompany winning poems in the 2026 Sue C. Boynton Poetry Awards. “I was honored to contribute to such a joyful local event.”

Victoria (she/they) is a lesbian eco-artist passionate about wildlife conservation, feminism, and indigenous sovereignty. She loves creating empowering artworks and reclaiming materials that would otherwise become trash. Their dream is to help beautify and Re-wild Bellingham by creating a large-scale eco-art installation for the city. 

Suzanne Morlock, MFA, MLA is an artist and social interventionist who entices human compassion via multidisciplinary works which expose narratives of vulnerability, dissecting and recombining sensory elements with a wry wit and a steady eye.

Influenced by early training in Los Angeles and later the rural surroundings of Northwestern Wyoming, she currently seeks inspiration from the Pacific Northwest. Morlock travels regularly seeking stories of place, context and human/non-human interactions. She exhibits internationally and maintains an active schedule dividing venues between experimental and traditional settings throughout the US and the world beyond.

Featured in Sculpture Magazine, The Green Magic of Recycling in 2012 Morlock was nominated for a United States Artists Fellowship and a Contemporary Northwest Artist Award in the same year. In 2014 Morlock received a Wyoming Arts Council Fellowship; in 2015 became a fellow of the American Scandinavian Foundation; in 2022 was the recipient of an ARPA Community Artist Grant from the Wyoming Arts Council and in 2025 completed a certificate program in Art & Ecology at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, Ireland.

Freelance artist Evan Whitehead was born in 1981 and is a native of Bellingham, Washington. 

He grew up in the foothills of Whatcom County and the North Cascade Range, surrounded by evergreens, alpine peaks, and saltwater shores. He attended local schools and Whatcom Community College, and to this day calls Bellingham home-where Mt. Baker towers in the distance and continues to inspire.

From a young age, Evan was drawn to the natural world with a sense of adventurism and wonder. The mountains became his playground, his escape, and his greatest inspiration. Whether skiing deep powder in the winter, hiking alpine ridges in the summer, or casting a line in pristine waters, these experiences flow directly into his work.

The San Juan Islands and the Salish Sea are an equally powerful source of influence. The interplay of light on water, rugged coastlines, and ever-changing skies fuel his creativity and reflect the deep connection he feels to this unique place.

Evan's artwork is a reflection of the landscapes and lifestyles that shape him-bold, textured, and full of movement. Through his paintings, he aims to share the spirit of the Pacific Northwest and inspire others to explore, protect, and appreciate the wild beauty that surrounds us.

“This is home. Out here is where I find clarity, inspiration, and purpose. I paint to share that feeling.” -Evan

Jim is a Bellingham-based illustrator, designer and artist. He’s a Bellingham native and a proud Western graduate. Over the years he has developed a broad skill set as a graphic designer, illustrator, art director, display designer, decor designer, fabricator and inventor. He also has worked in the fine arts and has shown his work throughout the Pacific Northwest. He debuted his first work in New York City in 2011. He’s an Artist in Residence at the Museum of Mechanical Art & Design in Stratford Upon Avon, U.K, where he has several pieces on permanent display. Although he still works in several disciplines, his present focus is on visual brand identity, editorial illustration and event graphics, predominantly for non-profit organizations. The SeaFeast 2025 Commemorative print represents his re-entry into the fine art world, and will continue with a new series of linoprints later in 2025.

Brandon Nelson discovered wood carving in 2019 when a giant Hemlock tree fell across his family's Squalicum Mountain driveway. The six-foot stump inspired him to create his first eagle sculpture, sparking a passionate hobby. Specializing in Pacific Northwest Sea creatures—humpback whales, orcas, and salmon—Nelson draws inspiration from master carver Tomas Vrba, whose work and wisdom continuously push his artistic skills forward. When not carving, he works as a Bellingham Realtor with Compass and enjoys training, racing, and adventuring with his wife Heather and children Hayden and Jazzy.

Tomas Vrba is a full-time wood, metal, and chainsaw sculptor originally from Slovakia. In 2006, he and his Washington-native wife opened Tomas Vrba Studio in north Bellingham. Since then, he has created sculptures for public art projects and private collections nationwide. His artwork has been exhibited in Seattle, Vienna, Bratislava, and British Columbia. His Bellingham studio welcomes visitors by appointment and participates in the annual October Whatcom Artist Studio tour, showcasing his diverse sculptural works to the public.

Tatiana Stone Wagner is a longtime lover of art, creativity, and the process of making things by hand. Her creative interests span a variety of media, with particular loves for watercolor pens, wood burning, and fiber arts including knitting, crochet, and embroidery.

Since 2022, Tatiana has been part of Bellingham SeaFeast, where her work has given her an even deeper appreciation for the artists, makers, maritime traditions, and creative communities of the Salish Sea region. She believes art is one of the many ways we build connections to place, to one another, and to the things we care about.

Tatiana enjoys experimenting across mediums and making pieces that reflect the people, places, and ideas that capture her imagination.

Maggie Hayward is a fisheries biologist and artist based in Bellingham, Washington, creating block prints and paintings inspired by the Salish Sea and Southeast Alaska.

Her work is rooted in a lifelong love of ecology and shaped by summers spent fishing, camping, and exploring Alaska’s coastal ecosystems.

Rooted in observation, lived experience, and a deep respect for the places we call home, Maggie hopes to inspire curiosity, stewardship, and a connection to the landscapes, waters, and wildlife around us.

Graham was born and raised in Australia, where he received his Bachelor’s Degree from Rusden State College, now Deakin University, in Melbourne. His primary focus was the art of human movement. After a number of years as a high school teacher and an extended stint traveling the world that expanded his interest in the art world, he transitioned into commercial art where he focused on branding and logo design.  In 1994, he started Odyssey Artworks, a design and sculpture studio in Denver, Colorado, with business partner, metal smith, and fellow traveler, Steve Pearson. Their studio primarily focused on metal sculpture and one-of-a-kind furniture for corporate and residential locations, using repurposed materials when possible. That is when he started grinding geometric and organic patterns on stainless steel; the images of fish came soon after — followed by feathers and birds — all of which are represented in his current series called Stainless Steelheads. Now living in Bellingham, Washington, Graham currently works in three different mediums — encompassing a wide range of techniques and materials. He is constantly experimenting and exploring new ideas and subject matter relevant to the Pacific Northwest and beyond.

Stephanie is a seamstress at Oyster Creek Canvas.

Kevin is originally from Tampa, Florida, and has always had a love and respect for the water and oceans and all that live and thrive in them. After moving to Bellingham in 2013, he found his home and genuine love for the PNW.

Kevin is also an active community member, working to build bridges within the community for a stronger Whatcom County. He is actively involved in the Bellingham Tourism Commission and LTAC Committee. He is a nationally acclaimed artist and believes in giving back to those groups and organizations that need to be uplifted. In 2017, Kevin was named Man of the Year by the Bellingham Regional Chamber of Commerce.

The key to success is collaboration to amplify all voices. Everyone has a voice and purpose, and it is up to us to ensure that we are being good stewards of how we live.  By building strong partnerships and community relationships, Kevin believes everyone has the best chance of success and sustainability. His motto is “Be the ripple of positivity.”

When Kevin is not working, he has a passion for cooking and eating well. He also has a mean green thumb when it comes to gardening and has an infectious laugh and humor.

ISABELLA TIGER MOTH creates art through mixed media, painting, and jewelry design, as well as beauty and SPFX makeup for film and television. Her current body of work includes stone and bone jewelry, nature based acrylic paintings, and shadow boxes highlighting ethically found and foraged items collected from our sacred waters, trees, and earth. Her love and esteem for the rugged West Coast wilderness, and more specifically her home in the PNW, shine brightly through the variety of work she produces. She finds limitless beauty in breathing new life into parts and pieces of plants and animals left behind, and strongly believes in the concept of “using every part.” When she’s not engaged in her art, she can often be found in the forest, at the beach, or in her garden.

Nature, winged animals, outer space, & marine-life are all a part of Rachel’s inspiration for painting and mixed-media on canvas, wood, collage, silks, & archival paper. There’s bioluminescent in nature and shown in the artwork. She’s captured the essence of the glowing & colorful animals in nature, which closely resembles them in their natural form. It’s achieved by using ultra-violet light reactive paints and inks, onto black backgrounds, on wood panels, or mixed-media on canvas. The vivid colors are visible without use of the UV light, but they are much brighter when used.

Rachel Simpson’s artwork focuses on nature, space, marine-life, the mystical, insects, and winged animals in both mixed-media on collage, silks, canvas and pointillism paintings. Recently, she's worked on winged animals from birds to insects, that shine under the daylight, then sparkle under UV-lighting. Enjoy the wild and wonder of her whimsical art!