PORT ANGELES — If Port Angeles were a compact ocean and you went snorkeling in it, you’d find just below the surface a wild community: artists, business owners, teachers, marine scientists and, of course, salmon.
They’re swimming together toward a single goal: a league of 20,000 sea creatures.
The waterborne local residents — coho and sockeye, rockfish and cabezon, sharks and eels — are to be represented in clay and wood in the Fish on the Fence public art installation.
Thursday morning, Lincoln High School art teacher Melissa Klein and Rosalynn Rees, owner of the Aglazing Art Studio in Port Angeles, guided a roomful of teenagers into the first phase of Fish on the Fence.
It will be a streaming display along the chain-link fence around The Landing mall at 115 E. Railroad Ave.
Together the students and teachers drew prototypes, painted weatherproof stoneware fish and visualized a created ecosystem on Port Angeles’ waterfront.
Paul Cronauer, one of The Landing’s owners, dreamed up Fish on the Fence as a way to beautify his surroundings, while drawing attention to the nearby Arthur D. Feiro Marine Life Center.
Fundraiser
Betsy Wharton, Port Angeles’ deputy mayor and a Feiro center board member, is organizing the effort to mount 20,000 artistic representations of fish and other marine animals while raising money to keep the center alive.
The Feiro center is losing $22,500 of its $45,000 in city funding — plus all $15,000 of its support from Peninsula College — this year.
Wharton and the center’s board and staff began a quest for fresh revenue streams. They’ve won a $15,000 Phillips Family Foundation grant but must now raise $15,000 in local matching funds.
Enter Rees, a fan of the Feiro center.
She’s setting up her paint-your-own-pottery studio at 713 E. First St. as a kind of Fish on the Fence station where customers can make donations — $5 for a ceramic herring, $25 for a big sockeye, for example — and then paint the fish and have them added to the installation at The Landing.
Rees also plans to make the fish — which she’s shaping and etching herself — available later this year at the Port Angeles Farmers Market, held each Saturday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Fourth and Peabody streets.
Meantime, Rees and the Feiro center donated a school of pottery fish plus art supplies to Lincoln High.
Plywood sea life
While Rees showed the students how to paint the small fish, Klein helped them create life-size sharks, flounders and other sea life out of plywood.
Each has a realistic side that shows the animal’s markings and an expressive side reflecting the artist’s impulses.
Crysania Morganroth, 17, created a blue shark that wears butterflies, a shimmering gold sun and a stylized moon on one flank and deep blue scales on the other.
Summer Briggs, also 17, is painting a clay coho salmon with scientifically accurate colors on one side and a peacel-and-flowers motif on the other.
This spring, Deborah Moriarty of the Feiro center will bring more students into the Fish on the Fence effort; she’ll visit elementary schools in Sequim and Port Angeles to teach fourth- and fifth-graders about local marine life.
Public party
On April 25, the Saturday after Earth Day, the Feiro will host a public painting party, so people of all ages can make donations, learn about local sea creatures and paint at least one specimen.
The whole conglomeration of fish could take quite a while to accumulate, Wharton acknowledged.
And while the project organizers won’t wait until all 20,000 have been painted, Wharton said they will gather a large number before they begin mounting them around The Landing.
“We’ve had success already,” she added, in the educational aspect.
Lincoln students have come down to the waterfront to visit the Feiro and learn how fish move, how they fit into the larger ecosystem and why their presence here is precarious.
“We’re hoping to make this Peninsula-wide,” Rees added.
She envisions bringing students from the West End, Port Townsend and beyond into the project.
Klein, for her part, is pleased that the students at Lincoln, an alternative high school, will display more of their art permanently in downtown Port Angeles.
Last June her art class painted a marine-life mural on the front of the Necessities & Temptations gift store at 217 N. Laurel St.
Fish on the Fence will be on a much larger scale, and it’ll hatch from a multi-faceted classroom experience, Klein said.
“I resisted teaching art for a long time. I wanted to be sure I was giving my students something they needed,” to make a living. She came to realize that her teenage pupils develop design sense and the ability to collaborate, which will serve them well in the working world.
Klein pointed out a big blue shark that three students worked on simultaneously.
“You’d better not have a big ego,” she said, when collaborating on such a thing.
“Art teaches problem-solving in a way that’s far more active and hands-on than traditional lecture format,” Klein added.
To her mind, this is a vocational technology course, just as cooking and auto repair are.
As she watched her students concentrate on their creatures’ colors, Klein said she’s pleased with the way Fish on the Fence brought business people, the Feiro center and teenagers together to produce a grand public display.
“There’s hope, in hard economic times, if we collaborate more,” she said. “Schools, businesses, nonprofits: I think everyone stands to gain.”
Rees agreed. “I just love the community involvement,” she said. “When the fish are mounted, it’ll be a huge monument.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
