PORT ANGELES — The space was calling out for it.
Port Angeles artist Michael Paul Miller answered. So what if he’s usually a two-dimensional painter?
He built a life-size, 3-D, mixed-media tree stump for the middle of the main gallery at the Port Angeles Fine Arts Center.
The 5-foot-tall and -wide pseudo-stump, he notes, is split into two halves. It teems with ferns, moss, six semi-functional bear traps, chains, spikes and a sledgehammer.
That’s one piece. It sits amid a light-filled forest of images in “Wild Olympia,” Miller’s one-man show opening at the fine arts center Saturday.
Everyone is welcome and admission is free to the show and the opening reception Saturday. During the opening from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m., Miller will be on hand to chat and guitarist Mark Owens, a newcomer to Port Angeles, will provide live music. Wine, snacks and drinks will flow.
At the show, on display through July 8, visitors will find themselves walking among about 20 paintings and drawings of Olympic Peninsula mountains, waters and skies, plus the tree stump.
Because the artwork comes from Miller’s mind, it’s not just pretty stuff.
“As with the wild places they reference, these paintings have teeth,” Miller wrote in his description of the show.
The art also carries references to earthquakes and other upsets; Miller seeks to make his work both seductive and striking. He’s exploring wilderness, and not just the one outside us.
“I hope people are able to spend a bit of time away from their daily routines,” at the fine arts center — and perhaps let the artwork mess with their minds a bit.
“When visiting an art exhibition,” he said, “I find it can often be about questioning. In this body of work I’m questioning life, death, sex, fear, beauty, our environment and our role in it, the violent forces of nature that have shaped this area, and the wild around us and in us.”
Miller, a midwesterner, came to the North Olympic Peninsula in 2008 to take a job teaching at Peninsula College. He’s now a professor of art and the director of the PUB Art Gallery, and has exhibited his own work at galleries across the region.
Known for his dark, surrealistic paintings, Miller had a solo show once before at the Port Angeles Fine Arts Center, shortly after relocating here.
Today, he’s grateful for the center, for his community and the natural beauty wrapped around it.
He said “Wild Olympia,” with its images of mountains, mega-quakes, sea stacks, tsunamis and rainforests, is about beauty and power — which may persist, but not without great change.
“Michael’s mind and art are intriguing to me,” said Jessica Elliott, the fine arts center’s executive director.
“This body of work provides an idealized image of wilderness, but yet he uses negative space — and it packs a punch.”
Miller gave a big nod to the fine arts center, “a special place,” he said, “with a history of some amazing people and exhibitions.”
“I’m glad that after living in this beautiful area for a decade, I have finally been able to respond to its landscape through art,” said Miller.
“Wild Olympia” is an ode to the wild world out there and, he said, “to those who live unrestrained.”
There’s the indoor gallery, open Thursdays through Sundays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; that’s surrounded by the Webster’s Woods art park, which covers 5 acres of trails, woods and meadow studded with mixed-media sculptures.
The park is open and free to the public from dawn until dusk daily. For more information about the center’s offerings, see www.PAFAC.org or call 360-457-3532.
