Andie Thrams

California-based visual artist Andie Thrams uses watercolors in wildland forests to create paintings and artist’s books that explore mystery, reverence, and delight, while grappling with the vanishing habitats of our era. Merging the lineages of illuminated manuscripts and natural history field journals with a contemporary art and science awareness, her paintings weave intricate botanical detail into rich layers of shape, color, and hand-lettered text to evoke the complex interconnections within ecosystems of the Greater West.

An interest in forests regularly takes her to remote places only accessible by foot or kayak for extended wilderness expeditions from Alaska to Baja California and Hawaii. She often invites natural materials and wild forces into her process by allowing seaweed or fungi to stain her paper, drawing with twigs dipped in ink, and leaving work out in the wind or rain. 

Andie Thrams grew up roaming the woodlands of the San Francisco Bay Area and began her career as a working artist while still in high school. She earned a BA in art practice from the University of California, Berkeley, and moved to Alaska soon after graduation. She has merged her devotion to art and outdoor adventure with stints as botanical illustrator, graphic designer, cartographer, calligrapher, exhibition designer, art educator, river guide, waitress, grocery bagger, ticket seller, and publisher. Her work is held in many public and private collections, is regularly exhibited, and has been honored by institutions including Sitka Center for Art & Ecology and Yosemite Renaissance. She lives in a small river town in the Sierra Nevada foothills with her husband. They spend time in the wilds whenever they can.