“Petra Pan,” a sassy clay sculpture in archer’s garb, has red hair and bangs that mirror those of her artist.

“My dad always loved me in braids,” Carrie Goller said.

“Petra” and other new pieces in clay are emblematic of Goller’s interest in trying out new forms. She just calls it playing.

But the prolific artist, a Bainbridge native now based in Poulsbo and Port Ludlow, has also made art a thriving business. Her work in oil, encaustic, and mixed media found an almost instant audience when she began painting professionally in the early 2000s; her first year out, she nabbed a licensing contract with a large reproduction company interested in her jewel-like still lifes of fruit.

Another year, she sold 100 originals. She’s built a steady commission business, had a recent solo show at the Inn at Port Hadlock, has pieces hanging in establishments around Bainbridge, and does a brisk business on the artist marketplace website, Etsy.com.

Tonight, as part of the island’s First Friday art walk, she’ll be back on her old stomping ground with a solo show at Victor Alexander Winery and Gallery on Madrone Lane.

“I have to say that although it’s very nice to be successful, and it’s nice to have the money, it’s (more) a sign that this is where I need to be,” she said.

The medium Goller chooses at any given time has a strong impact on the mood of the resulting pieces. The fruit paintings, in oil, glow singularly against dark blue backgrounds, conveying a vastly different feeling than, say, her encaustic cupcakes or her small, jewel-toned folk landscapes crowded with structure and color. Other motifs have included kids, nests, ravens and branches.

More recently Goller began working with paint over clay, a la “Petra,” as a way of trying something brand new and detaching from certain themes – the birds, primarily – which, for a variety of reasons, she’s just over.

It’s encaustic, though, that she keeps coming back to: “I just feel a sense of alchemy with it,” she said.

She often mixes wax with other media, for instance photos, blocks of wood, even dental floss to fashion a tiny pair of wings. She loves it because of how it can be etched into, built up, molded, colored, mixed and manipulated.

“You can elevate the stuff,” she said.

Art was a calling but not a practice for Goller until 2002, when she was diagnosed with and underwent treatment for breast cancer.

“I guess that was the big tipping point in my life. I had a lot of stress. I needed to do more creative things,” she said.

Goller’s industrious family had drilled into her the idea that working artists starve. So she tried hobbies like knitting and piano. In six months, she could play “The Moonlight Sonata” with competence, but it wasn’t tripping her trigger.

Then one Christmas, she did portraits of her three stepsons, as a gift to their mother. The recipient cried. Goller kept going.

“I found I’d gotten a source of harmony and balance in art,” she said.

Goller said she “goes somewhere else” when she works, and she prefers to work alone, snapping to attention when the phone rings only to wonder, “Who painted that?”

She counts as her blessings the family, friends, staff members, and community of other artists who support her work.

She also acknowledges her luck as an artist, to have the skill and the outlet to work out her “stuff.”

Maybe that’s partly why she wants to try as many new mediums as she can, and to continue taking classes, mentoring other artists, and arranging art exchanges – I’ll teach you encaustic if you teach me clay.

“There’s so much more to do,” she said.

See Carrie Goller’s new work starting tonight at Victor Alexander Winery on Madrone lane, and see www.carriegoller.com.