Kimberly Trowbridge is a painter, an installation artist, a performer, and a lecturer on color theory. She received her MFA from the University of Washington (2006). Her first solo museum show at Bainbridge Island Museum of Art (2021) was developed during her time as Creative Fellow at Bloedel Reserve (2018-2020), a 150-acre garden amid an old growth forest.

Trowbridge recently completed a Facebook Open Arts commission (2021), and was Artist in Residence at Jentel Artist Residency, in Wyoming. She is a two-time Neddy Award Finalist (2014, 2016), and an Artist Trust GAP Grant recipient (2014). She is the Director of the Modern Color Atelier, a multi-year painting program at Gage Academy of Art, Seattle. She has led plein-air painting tours in Spain, Portugal, and Twisp, WA.

My creative practice involves a deep exploration of the natural world around me by collecting “data” in the form of field-paintings and then transforming that data into larger, narrative paintings. My research is specific to place and is a process of unearthing images from my environment. The places I spend time in become theaters where I observe color, shape, and rhythm. These formal elements become the visual building blocks that I further explore in my studio paintings.

As a practicing artist and director of a rigorous painting program, I am involved in the building of a visual language that helps articulate multiple layers of perception. I believe that nature is the most exciting and complex theater for the observation of color and shape relationships which in turn reveal structures about our own experience. Working from nature is a way of re-articulating one’s perception, wherein the boundaries of the self are blurred and our connection to our environment is revealed as deeply intertwined.

Perception, for me, is a full-body exchange and painting directly from nature is a sentient process of tuning and alignment.

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