Even as a toddler, whenever she was toted along to her sister’s preschool classroom, the teachers scrambled to hide the paints, knowing tiny Michaela would use them all up if she could. Michaela learned quickly that water was where anything and everything can be found - from eighty-thousand-pound sea creatures to pinky-sized abandoned treasures from the terrifying sense of mortality to the tiniest thrills of discovery.Īs a young girl, Michaela also discovered that she was an artist. There were so many boats, and memories of riding through storms so severe that Michaela was certain she and her family would capsize. (She stored her sparkling findings in an old purple plastic jewelry box.) When a humpback whale swam too close to her kayak, Michaela’s mother calmed her, assuring her that there was nothing to worry about. While her father and sister fished from the beach, Michaela crept through tide pools, hunting for fishing lures in the rocks, cut and left behind by unlucky fishermen. Raised since infancy in Juneau, Alaska, Michaela spent her childhood beside or on the water. As an enrolled member of the Tlingit Nation of Alaska - where they identify as People of the Tides - water has shaped her entire life. Would it cooperate with her vision? Or would it rebel on the page, as water often does, performing with a mind of its own? Water is alive, and to be revered, she knows. Rather than shy away from the often unpredictable will of the water, she chooses to honor it.

Watercolor is a daunting medium for many artists, but not for Michaela. At last, color combination perfected, Michaela brought brush to paper. She uncapped and squeezed paint - cerulean, cobalt, ultramarine - onto her mixing palette. In a tiny cabin, surrounded on three sides by ocean, Michaela Goade dipped her brush into a jar of water.

Michaela goade we are water protectors