PORT TOWNSEND — Artists will be out to meet the public during the Saturday Art Walk from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Among the galleries staying open late, most offering refreshments, are the Northwind Art Grover Gallery and Jeanette Best Gallery, Gallery 9, and Port Townsend Gallery.
At the Jeanette Best Gallery, 701 Water St., Carolyn Heryford Watts displays her paintings of nature.
“Carolyn Heryford Watts paints in a scale so large that it provides a kind of environment for viewers,” according to the Northwind Art website at northwindart.org.
“Amoebas, pods, flowers, deserts, the cosmos — all are part of her repertoire of forms, which she monumentalizes so that we can see, up close and personal, the worlds that Carolyn portrays.”
The artist is donating her portion of the proceeds of sales of her work from this exhibit to two organizations — Port Townsend’s Jumping Mouse Children’s Center, a nonprofit entity providing mental health services to children, and Perma-Atlas, a nonprofit entity working toward sustainable recovery of the Moroccan Atlas Mountain ecosystem.
Grover Gallery, 236 Taylor Street, is exhibiting a show of work by Northwind Art School teaching artists. Featured this fall until Nov. 28 are Darsie Beck, Nonie Gaines, Tracy Bigelow Grisman, Meg Kaczyk, Suzanne Lamon, Julie Read and Dana Sullivan.
Gallery-9
Gallery-9, at 1012 Water St., is featuring Carolyn Doe and her silk batik and oil paintings, and Larry and Linda Gonzales, who create seemingly framed relief wood carvings, this month.
Artists who exhibit in the shop will be on hand Saturday for the art walk. Other days Gallery-9, which shows the work of 215 artists, is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day but Tuesday.
Doe is a self-taught artist. Her current works are framed silk batiks with autumn themes and birds.
“I started working in batik on silk fabric over 30 years ago,” Doe said. “Batik has become my voice.”
Using pure beeswax and silk dyes she creates images of nature on silk fabric. These are then stretched and framed under glass.
Her oil paintings with palette knives show wide horizons with stately trees, or the quick pose of a small bird on a slender branch.
Linda and Larry Gonzales create wood relief carvings of nature found in the marine world of the Olympic Peninsula. From whales, octopus and sea stars to seascapes and mammals, their carvings bring images of the Salish Sea straight into the home.
Both grew up in Colorado, Larry on a farm. He became interested in metal soldering at an early age while welding farm equipment and working with such materials as metal, wood and glass. He taught himself stained glass and wood marquetry and later focused on wood sculpting.
Linda worked as a kindergarten teacher for 25 years. During that time, she learned tp make make dream catchers out of rhizomes from trees and sinew and inuksuks from rocks.
When the couple moved to Washington from Colorado, Larry took up relief carving while Linda helped design the piece and color it. Their business is called “By the Sea.”
The artists prioritize local woods such as red and yellow cedar, birch, maple, alder and madrone.
The Gallery-9 website is at www.gallery-9.com.
Port Townsend Gallery
The Port Townsend Gallery, at 715 Water St., is highlighting the work of Martha Collins and Margaret Woodcock this month.
It will serve light refreshments during the art walk. The rest of the week, it is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily and by appointment.
Collins produces her work through a process of lamination.
Using the natural colors of sustainable woods from all over the world, she pairs them with either natural veneer or dyed maple veneer, much of which she has dyed herself, organizers said. She produces a line of small spirit bowls, jewelry and tableware.
This month at the Port Townsend Gallery, she is presenting new work.
“Chartres Bowl” is inspired by the Chartres Cathedral in France. The bowl is 2.75 inches high, 1.5 inches wide with 300 individual pieces of wood in it.
Collins went to trade school in 1974, trained by the State of Michigan as a cabinetmaker because Title IX had just been passed. Concurrently apprenticing in a shop where wood jewelry was made she learned about lamination of exotic woods, dying veneer and was there when the process was discover that she has pursued ever since.
In 2021, Collins was accepted into the prestigious Smithsonian Craft Show in Washington, D.C., one of five woodworkers presenting there.
Over the past year, as a result of walks through the woods and waking up each morning to the light coming through the alders outside, Woodcock’s interest in trees has grown.
The paintings she is presenting at Port Townsend Gallery explore tree compositions that she has developed using primarily oil in cold wax applied to a wood panel.
“Her goal is to not so much to be representative in approach, but to connect the fluidity of paint with the expressiveness of the vertical, cathedral-like structures and her own creative response to the forest light, messiness of branches and undergrowth and movement within a seemingly quiet forest world,” organizers said in a press release.
She also is exhibiting hand-pulled prints.
For more gallery information, phone 360-379-8110 or see www.porttownsendgallery.com.
Across the Sound by Carolyn Doe is on view at Gallery-9.
