QUILCENE — Mary Pfund and Bill Schult did not intend to buy an old three-bay auto repair garage and turn it into an art gallery, but when they looked through the grimy windows of the building just off U.S. Highway 101 in Quilcene four years ago, they saw the potential for one.
“There were wood beams and high ceilings,” Pfund said. “It had great bones.”
Pfund and Schult had been living in Key West, Fla., but they wanted to relocate after visiting the area and attending the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival.
The building was ideal for Pfund, an artist, and for Schult, a woodworker and boat builder who creates custom furniture for homes and businesses.
Transforming the 3,000-square-foot space from a garage into Seven Monkeys Art Gallery and Studio took more than two years of hard, dirty work.
All of the equipment from the auto repair business had to be removed and hauled away. The interior was stripped down to the frame, new windows were installed and a single entry with a pair of doors reclaimed from an old movie theater replaced three roll-up garage doors.
“I knocked out all the walls between the posts and beams, knocked down the exterior walls and replaced them,” Schult said. “I had to build a new roof on the front of the building.”
Then the real drudgery began.
Fifty years of oil, grease and gasoline had to be scrubbed out of the concrete floor. Schult sanded down all of the wood to remove all remnants of vehicle exhaust that had permeated them.
The gallery finally opened in October. It is currently featuring six artists who work in a variety of media: photography, handmade paper collage, wood turning, basket weaving, acrylics and watercolor.
“We like locals who aren’t showing other places,” Pfund said. “We’re looking for something you don’t see anywhere else.”
Schult turned a shed on the property that had been used for an auto paint business into a woodworking shop where he has created the gallery’s big maple sculpture pedestals and display table. Under a shelter behind the gallery, he is rebuilding a 30-foot wood trawler.
Pfund would like to see the Seven Monkeys Gallery and the area’s cultural attractions, like the Worthington Mansion and Quilcene Historical Museum, get together to market themselves to visitors.
“My vision is for Quilcene to become a destination to people to see the arts,” Pfund said.
She has plans to start modestly, such as offering reasonably priced art classes in her studio, which is flooded with natural light and heated with a wood stove.
Working with students in the Quilcene School District is another possibility.
“I’d like to host the high school art show in the spring,” she said.
However, everything is a work in progress, even the gallery space that Schult was continuing to build display cases for, so the galley can increase the number of artists it shows.
As for the gallery’s name, Pfund said Seven Monkeys was Schult’s idea and she couldn’t talk him out of it.
Schult said he can’t remember how he came up with it.
“I just liked it,” he said.
Seven Monkeys Art Gallery and Studio, online at www.sevenmonkeysgallery.com, is open by appointment at 51 Herbert St. by calling 360-842-1014. It also sells sustainably manufactured leather and palm wood furniture from Pacific Green.
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Reporter Paula Hunt can be reached by email at paula.hunt@peninsuladailynews.com.
