At age 22, Nicole Scragg (@NMS_art on Twitter) is already a dedicated Portland Timbers fan in a decidedly Timbers household in Vancouver, Washington. Her husband, Reece, is a Timbers fan and soccer coach with the Washington Timbers Academy, a Timbers-affiliated program for five- to 19-year-olds. When they brought home a cat in 2015, Nicole — who is very much a cat person — named the orange tabby Cat Borchers (also @cat_borchers on Twitter), riffing off popular Timbers defender Nat Borchers.
And she’s recently upped her fandom a notch by combining her passion for painting with her love for the Timbers.
Scragg is currently embarking on a project to paint all the players on the Timber roster one by one. “Right now, that's what I'd like to accomplish,” she says, though she notes that the changing roster might present challenges.
She says her painting is a meditative practice, which she currently does about an hour a day after work, that she began after taking a college class at her hometown Clark College. It’s also what led her to meet Reece in 2015 -- her brother was on a team Reece coached, he commissioned a painting from her, and the rest was history.
Scragg recently opened an online store featuring her paintings, and while the Timbers works aren’t part of that (yet), she’s open to creating Timbers-themed paintings for fans who reach out to her. She is using her Twitter account, however, to document the project, which so far, has included portraiture of Darlington Nagbe (captured in a post-match moment with his daughter), Diego Valeri, and Vytas Andriuskevicius.
Image via Nicole Scragg
She also painted her cat’s namesake, Nat Borchers, holding the 2015 MLS Cup. It was the first painting in her series, and this past November, it represented another important first for her. She got to meet Borchers and present the painting to him when he did a promotional appearance for Monkey Oil — fittingly, a local company specializing in beard care products — at a local mall.
“When I brought the painting for Nat to sign, I had it hidden until it was our turn to meet him,” she says. “It's one thing to have done a painting of someone and share it online, but to show it to them in person? I'm already an introvert as it is. I think I probably said five words to him!”
Photo via Nicole Scragg
Borchers appreciated the effort, though, he says. “It's both an ego-stroke as well as humbling. I can't think of anything cooler than seeing myself in an artist's rendering," he says. "At the same time, I can't help but wonder how I got to a place in life where people would want to actually paint my face on canvas!”
He’s also flattered that the couple named their cat after him, noting, “I'm a huge cat fan -- we have a cat named Taco -- so I think it's a brilliant idea. They've obviously got the rhyming thing down, and the cat is a ginger, so they've got it spot on, in my opinion.”
