Pamela Wachtler received a BFA from Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia in 1972 and moved to the Pacific Northwest in 1977. For 25 years she worked as a commercial designer and illustrator — a discipline that developed her precision with composition and her understanding of how images hold attention before a viewer has decided to look. When she turned full-time to fine art, she brought that professional fluency with her. Her subject became the natural world of Bainbridge Island: its birds, marshes, harbor light, majestic trees, and the specific quality of its overcast, silvery skies.
In Wren in the Moonlight, a small brown wren perches centrally on a weathered gray-green stone, surrounded by layered washes of sage, moss, and pale cream that blur the boundary between rock surface and atmospheric fog. The artist's watercolor builds form through translucent glazes—the bird's silhouette rendered in dark umber against luminescent grays and whites—while the upper left moon glows as a pale circular form almost indistinguishable from the surrounding mist. The composition positions the wren as an anchor within an abstracted landscape where vertical tree forms suggest depth without clarity, and the wet-into-wet technique allows pigments to pool and diffuse, creating soft edges that dissolve specific detail into mood. The painting's restraint feels almost reluctant—Wachtler withholds the sharper naturalism the subject might demand, choosing instead to half-hide her bird within atmospheric obscurity, which ultimately makes the wren's alert posture more compelling than any rendered plumage could be. She works across multiple media — oil painting, watercolor, monotype printmaking, and hand-colored photography. Each medium has different capabilities for describing what she is looking at: a heron at rest reads differently in monotype than in watercolor, and the choice is part of the meaning. In recent years her addition of monotype has brought the element of discovery and surprise inherent in printmaking into her practice. Her work has been described as “magical and mysterious within a strong compositional framework and rich palette.”
She was inspired by the Philadelphia Ten — a group of women artists affiliated with Moore College of Art and Design who exhibited together from 1917 to 1945 along the East Coast and Midwest. Their sustained collective practice and dedication to the natural world as subject are both present in her work. In Fall 2018 she was the Featured Artist at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art for the exhibition “Impressions of Place.” Her work is sold through the BIMA Museum Store and has been featured in Bainbridge Currents. She collaborated with her son Alex Fermanis on the book A Time of Light and Hazy Color — his poetry, her illustrations.
Early on I made a conscious choice to portray through my art the beauty and hope that I find in nature. My goal is to provide a moment of respite from the chaos of our complex world. Like planting trees before you die, I wish to leave a legacy of the magical places here — the majestic trees, serene harbors, and the habitat of creatures we seldom see.
