Jaime Crain is a painter and designer based in the Inland Northwest.
Jaime works primarily in oil paint, and her work explores the beauty
and power of the human mind through themes such as memory,
mental illness, and contemporary social issues. She combines figures
with nonobjective environments and embraces heightened, often
unexpected color. Jaime graduated summa cum laude from Whitworth
University in the spring of 2022 with a bachelor’s degree in fine art
and graphic design. She has been granted numerous awards and
scholarships from organizations such as the Northwest Watercolor
Society and the Spokane Valley Arts Council. Jaime’s work has been
included in several group exhibitions, the most notable being the
Garage Sale Exhibition, which she co-founded and curated.
About Jaime
Drawing from my experience with extreme emotional highs and lows,
primary themes in my work are the beauty and power of the human
mind as well as its inevitable downfalls. Consequently, my motivation
to create work is to express the intensity of certain emotions,
memories, and dreams using the specifics of the human figure. My
paintings combine portraiture with nonobjective and often abstract
environments. While all my work is representational, realism is not
my primary objective. I enjoy creating heightened and dramatic color
palettes that push my work in a contemporary direction.
Painting, for me, is active. It forces me to move around to see my
work and my surroundings in unexpected ways. As a young adult, I’ve
realized that, yes, painting is what I do, but being an artist is who I am.
It defines and explains me in more ways than I realized in the past. If I
could give one healing statement to my younger self, I would tell her
that she’s an artist. That’s her “why.”
