Julie
Devine

Julie Devine has been painting the Pacific Northwest since 1991. She works outdoors — in the Cascades, along the Skagit, in the Methow — and finishes in the studio, where the field notes give way to decisions. The paintings she brings back from that second process are not illustrations of places. They are arguments about what the places asked her to look at.

In the North Cascades series, Diablo Lake appears not as a record but as a claim: the turquoise is too saturated for a photograph, too deliberate for an accident. It is the color you carry away from standing at that overlook, held at an angle that the camera doesn't reach. The knifework and gestural brushwork at the edges refuse documentary clarity. That refusal is the work's intelligence.

The Verbascum paintings shift the subject entirely — garden, close distance, an unruly plant that blooms too big and too brief — and find in it the same formal questions. Light, edge, the thing seen versus the thing felt. Devine does not tighten as she moves from mountain to garden. If anything she loosens, and the canvases at 36 × 36 hold more uncertainty than the same painter at distance. That is harder to do than it looks.

Her work is in the permanent collection of the Fairmont Olympic Hotel in Seattle and has been acquired by the Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga. She shows regularly with the Seattle Art Museum Gallery, Gallery Mack, and Yuan Ru Gallery in Bellevue. Additions at JG Art Gallery marks her first showing on Bainbridge Island. Devine is an invited guest artist for the exhibition, June 5 through July 1, 2026.