Art we’ve collected

Oceana Masterman-Smith

London, England first acquired 2026

A London printmaker who works almost entirely in blind embossing. She carves traditional grey lino by hand, then runs damp paper over the block on an etching press with enough pressure that the image stands up out of the sheet — no ink at all, so the picture exists only in light and shadow and changes through the day with the window. Raised between Vermont and England and a dual citizen, she took a fine art degree in 2011 and a master’s in museum and gallery studies, co-founded The Baldwin Gallery in London, and curated Meryl McMaster’s As Immense as the Sky at Canada House on Trafalgar Square in 2020. A cheap linocut kit bought on impulse during the pandemic brought her back to making work of her own. Her subjects are things that pass through air: birds, clouds, petals letting go.

oceanamastermansmith.com

Nick Wroblewski

Boise, Idaho first acquired 2026

A woodcut printmaker of more than thirty years whose focus is large, multicolor reduction prints — wood, ink and paper, and nothing that hides the hand. He grew up among the artists of Minneapolis, making puppets and painting with In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater, which once toured the Mississippi by houseboat, and took his fine arts degree at Bennington College in Vermont. He has printed from studios in Duluth and the Driftless hills of Wisconsin before settling in Boise. His woodcuts illustrate Mary Casanova’s Wake Up, Island (2016) and Hush Hush, Forest (2018), and his subjects are the birds, trees and weather of the North Woods, cut in a stylised line that owes something to the Japanese masters.

nickwroblewski.com

Kathleen B. Hudson

Colorado Springs, Colorado first acquired 2026

A landscape painter in oil, working in the studio and on location, whose real subject is light and weather — the build of a cumulus head, the moment the sun leaves a ridge. Born in 1986 and raised in Kentucky, she read History & Literature at Harvard, was taken into Boston’s Copley Society of Art, and now paints from Colorado Springs. She is a Signature Member and Vice President of the Plein Air Painters of America and the second youngest artist ever elected a Fellow of the American Society of Marine Artists; her Bright Morning, Timberline Falls took the Grand Prize in the 2017 PleinAir Salon.

kathleenbhudson.com

James Cook

London, England first acquired 2026

He draws with typewriters. Since 2014 he has made more than 350 works on over a hundred vintage machines, building each image keystroke by keystroke out of letters, numbers, and punctuation — a single piece takes anywhere from a week to three months, and many of them hide messages in the text. For anything larger than a sheet will allow he types the sections separately and hot-presses them together. He travels with a typewriter in his backpack, which reliably baffles airport security.

jamescookartworkshop.com

Kelli MacConnell

Chimacum, Washington first acquired 2026

A printmaker of the Pacific Northwest landscape, working in hard contrast and very little color. Born and raised in Cincinnati, she came to Portland in 2006, found printmaking while studying art at Portland State, and took her BFA in it in 2012; she now works from Chimacum, Washington. Asked why a print rather than a painting, she answers that much of the joy rests in the surprise — the mystery that unfolds while printing each piece. She sits on the board of Portland’s Art in the Pearl and mentors emerging artists.

kellimacconnell.com

Lindsey Jackson

Mammoth Lakes, California first acquired 2026

A printmaker of the Eastern Sierra, and a tattoo artist besides. In her own words, the Eastern Sierra is my home, mountains are my passion — and she has finished the Sierra Peaks Section list, the Sierra Club’s long roll of Sierra Nevada summits, so the country in her prints is country she has climbed. She works by reduction, carving another layer away from the block for every color it prints, which destroys the block as it goes and makes the edition unrepeatable.

instagram.com/lindseyjinthewild

Cameron Bailey

United States first acquired 2026

A printmaker working in water-based Japanese woodblock — mokuhanga. He studied painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art and took up printmaking in 2016, drawing on German Romanticism, American Tonalism, and Japanese shin-hanga. He works by reduction: one block, sometimes several, carved away again between colors, so the block is destroyed in the making and the edition can never be reprinted. Design, carving, and printing are all his own hand — the ink brushed on with rice paste and the paper pressed with a baren rather than a press.

cameronbaileyprints.com

Dave Eggers

San Francisco, California first acquired 2026

Better known as a writer and publisher — he wrote A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, founded McSweeney’s, and co-founded the youth writing center 826 Valencia — Eggers learned screen printing in a high school arts course and came back to it in 2026, in a new studio in the basement of 849 Valencia in San Francisco. Proceeds go to the International Library of Youth Writing, which fills the building above the studio.

store.mcsweeneys.net

Herberth Ccahuana Quinto

Cusco, Peru first acquired 2026

A watercolorist from Cusco and a graduate of the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes Diego Quispe Tito there, where he has made watercolor his whole practice. He paints the Andes as they are found away from the city, in his words este es mi mundo, este es mi hogar — this is my world, this is my home. He has shown locally, nationally, and internationally, and in 2026 the International Watercolor Society Ecuador and Urban Sketchers Quito invited him, alongside painters from Ecuador and Argentina, to judge which Ecuadorian watercolorists would represent them at the XVI Bienal Internacional de Acuarela in Mexico City — held at the Museo Nacional de la Acuarela, the first museum anywhere given over to the medium.

instagram.com/ccahuanaquinto

Charles Muench

Nevada first acquired 2026

A landscape painter living between the Sierra Nevada and the Nevada high desert. He took a BFA with great distinction from San Jose State, studied under Maynard D. Stewart, and in 1992 moved to Madrid to copy the masters in the Prado. A signature member of the California Art Club, he has won its Irvine Museum Gold Medal, and his work is held by the Hilbert Museum of California Art and the Irvine Museum.

waterhousegallery.com/artists/charles-muench

Derek Harrison

Santa Barbara, California first acquired 2026

A realist painter of dramatic figurative and landscape work, named to Southwest Art's “21 Under 31” and a repeat finalist in the ARC Salon. He took first place two years running at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. He teaches at the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art and at Westmont College, and his aim, in his own words, is to find “color combinations that can strike at the heart of the human spirit.”

derekharrisonart.com

Frank Serrano

Owens Valley, California first acquired 2026

A painter of the Western landscape and its atmospheric light, working since 1993. He learned largely from studying Edgar Payne, Maynard Dixon, and Sam Hyde Harris, and has been a signature member of the California Art Club since 1997, chairing its Gold Medal Museum Exhibition. He wrote Plein Air Painting in Oil, and Disney Animation invited him to teach painting technique for 3D film work.

waterhousegallery.com/artists/frank-serrano

Wyllis Heaton

Santa Barbara, California first acquired 2026

Born in Pasadena in 1976, he is an award-winning plein-air landscape painter and a licensed landscape designer. He took a degree in illustration from Art Center in Pasadena in 2002 and taught for six years at the California Art Academy in San Gabriel. Santa Barbara has been home since 2007, and he paints its coast and hills on location, chasing light that changes faster than the picture can be finished.

waterhousegallery.com/artists/wyllis-heaton

Elise Seeds

Los Angeles, California first acquired 2026

Born Elise Alyse Seeds, she trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and studied dance with Isadora Duncan in Berlin before joining the Ziegfeld Follies as a dancer. Film followed, and with it the credit she is still best remembered for — W. C. Fields's foil in The Dentist (1932). Her 1932 marriage to the book designer and print collector Merle Armitage drew her back to art; by 1933 she had turned to abstraction, becoming one of the first non-objective painters in Southern California — though she never gave up the figure, as this 1936 gouache shows. She showed Out of Space at the 1939 New York World's Fair, and in the 1950s co-founded Functionists West with Helen Lundeberg and Lorser Feitelson.

lacma.org/template/elise

Ellie Freudenstein

Santa Barbara, California first acquired 2026

A plein-air oil painter of the California central coast, France, and Italy. She took a B.A. in Fine Arts with Honors at UCLA and did graduate work there under William Brice, Jan Stussy, Sam Amato, and Rico Lebrun, then spent a career in graphic design before returning to painting. Her canvases are richly colored and full of movement. She is a signature member of the American Impressionist Society and of Women Artists of the West, a full artist member of the California Art Club and Oil Painters of America, and was recently inducted into the National Association of Women Artists.

elliefreudenstein.com

Mark Bistranin

Skagit Valley, Washington first acquired 2026

A plein-air oil painter of the Northwest — Skagit Valley farmland, Puget Sound, and the San Juans, painted on location. Born in Denver and trained at the University of Denver, he spent some fifteen years working on Montana ranches before settling in the Skagit in 1989. He co-owns the gallery in La Conner where we found this piece.

Monique Wales

Yosemite, California first acquired 2026

Born in 1965 and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, she is a largely self-taught printmaker who began exhibiting in 2012 and works chiefly in reductive relief. Her subjects are the wildlife of the mountain West and the case for protecting it. She has shown four times in Birds in Art at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum.

moniquewales.com

Ken Ferguson

Innerleithen, Scottish Borders first acquired 2026

A Scottish watercolorist of the Highlands and Islands. He read chemistry at Edinburgh, came to painting in the early 1980s, and has worked at it full time since 1990. He is known for surfaces with no visible brushwork and for the afterglow that follows sunset over still water.

thejettygallery.com/ken-ferguson.html

Yoshiko Yamamoto

Kamakura, Japan first acquired 2025

She works in the idiom of the Arts and Crafts movement — flat color, heavy outline, nature pressed into pattern — cutting her own linoleum and wood blocks and printing them on a letterpress. The Arts & Crafts Press was hers in Tacoma for years and now runs from Kamakura; several of the prints here are of the Pacific Northwest she left, and one is of William Morris’s own house.

artsandcraftspress.com

Micah Crandall-Bear

Sacramento, California first acquired 2024

A painter of abstract landscapes built from horizontal bands — atmosphere at the top grading down through strata to the subterranean — worked wet-on-wet in acrylic. His paintings are held by the Crocker Art Museum and in the collections of Facebook, HBO, and Visa.

micahcrandallbear.com

Sarah Finger

Bellingham, Washington first acquired 2024

Working as Skyline Printworks, she hand-carves blocks for linocuts, multi-block reduction prints, and jigsaw prints drawn from Pacific Northwest landscapes and the outdoors. A reduction print is carved and printed in layers from the same block, which is progressively destroyed as it goes — so once an edition is done it can never be reprinted.

skylineprintworks.com

Diane Snoey Appler

Maui, Hawaii first acquired 2024

A plein-air oil painter of Maui's coastline, working on location to catch scenes in passing light — tide pools, leaning palms, and the particular color of the water on the south shore.

dianeappler.com

Steve Thomas

United States first acquired 2021

An award-winning illustrator working in the language of mid-century travel posters — flat color, clean geometry, and a sense of somewhere worth going. Alongside his California Central Coast series he has produced licensed Star Wars and Disney artwork and a run of National Parks posters.

stevethomasart.com

Sarah Goodnough

Oregon first acquired 2019

An Oregon painter whose work is drawn from the human spirit and the splendor of the natural world — birds in bare branches, seedheads, and wide washes of color that sit between abstraction and landscape. She keeps her print editions deliberately small to preserve the intimacy of owning one.

sarahgoodnough.com

Stephen McMillan

Ashland, Oregon first acquired 2019

Born in Berkeley in 1949, he has made aquatint etchings of wilderness landscapes since taking his BFA in 1975, and was artist-in-residence at the Kala Institute for thirteen years. The prints look photographic but contain no photograph: working from a 3 × 5″ print of his own slide, he paints acid-resistant stop-out onto a rosin-grounded copper plate, lightest areas first, then bites it in acid and paints out the next tone — seven or eight rounds to reach a full range, often weeks to a plate. Color means a separate plate each, two to four of them, separated by eye and left to mix on the press. His work is held by the Brooklyn Museum and the Portland Art Museum.

sonic.net/aquatint

Jeffrey Hull

Cannon Beach, Oregon first acquired 2019

A representational painter who has spent more than forty years on the Oregon coast, working in watercolor and oil at the line where water meets land. He shows from his own gallery in Cannon Beach.

hullgallery.com

Kathleen Cantin

North Carolina first acquired 2019

Trained at the University of New Hampshire and working in North Carolina within reach of the Blue Ridge, she makes line etchings worked over with aquatint and printed in color from four or more plates. She designs the color first by watercoloring a proof of the master plate, then works out how to reach that mood in plates — as many as eight or nine colors carried on a single one — and adds no hand coloring at all: everything on the paper was printed. Her work is held by the Smithsonian Institution, the Philadelphia Public Library, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, and she has taken commissions from the Franklin Mint and from President and Mrs. Derek Bok of Harvard.

kathleencantinartwork.com

Mark Peter McKnight

Indianola, Washington first acquired 2018

A director of photography with more than thirty years behind a motion-picture camera — camera movement, choreography of action, the manipulation of light — now turned to still photography. His botanical work is characteristically soft, misted, and low-lit, and is printed on aluminum.

saatchiart.com/account/profile/998965