It began with those beatniks.
This was the 1950s in Pasadena, Calif., and Anna Wiancko, a preschooler, was visiting her cousin. This cousin had “a couple of beatnik friends.” They were playing with clay, just kids making art.
Wiancko is still that girl, even if she grew up to become a painter, teacher and art therapist. At the heart of it all is this earthy medium.
She chooses clay to create likenesses of her beloved animals: a gray whale with her calf, gleaming ravens, horses whose manes and tails fly.
Well-known in Oregon and Washington for her art, Wiancko also teaches in her home studio near Freshwater Bay and, once a year or so, at the Port Angeles Fine Arts Center.
Wiancko has been working with young artists since she was a teenager herself.
“When I was baby-sitting, I would always get out the art supplies,” she remembers.
Wiancko credits her aunt, the late Mary Spurlock, for nudging her. Firmly. The family moved from Pasadena to Gold Beach, Ore., when Wiancko was 10. Six years later, on a vacation in Hawaii, young Anna was badly hurt while riding her horse; she was laid up for months. Her aunt presented her with art supplies and instructions to get busy.
Wiancko grew up to be a wife and mother of three in Sisters, Ore. She also followed her heart into the mountains, hiking from the high country down to the sea, and studying the wild creatures around her.
Then a tragedy darkened everything. Wiancko’s daughter Erica became ill with cancer. She died at 16.
Wiancko’s first marriage ended, and she sought a new life with her two surviving children in Portland, Ore.
She decided to go back to school, and spent five years earning a bachelor’s degree in art and psychology and a master’s in art therapy at Marylhurst University.
Whoever you are, Wiancko believes, you can find solace in art.
As a therapist, she has worked with people who have lost a loved one, as she did, and with patients undergoing treatment for cancer. She’s led children’s projects at the Port Angeles Fine Arts Center, and this past January, she presented the center with a grant from the Wiancko Family Trust: $15,000 for the budding community education program.
Wiancko shares her home with another creative spirit: Her husband Paul Chasman, an accomplished guitarist and composer. They met in Portland, then went to live on the coast, near Waldport, Ore. In 2006, they took a trip to the Olympic Peninsula and were enchanted, permanently, by its beauty.
Chasman made his living as a recording artist, performer and teacher — until he injured his left hand. While recovering from surgery, he began writing folk songs and taking voice lessons. He’s since been “reincarnated,” as he puts it, as a singer-songwriter. Chasman has a new album out, “Basics,” with songs about nature, politics, society and love. One of the tracks, titled “She Walks in Balance,” is Chasman’s song for his mate.
Now, another new vista has opened up for Wiancko.
She used to be a solitary worker, whether painting, working in clay or mixing the two. It was “I just want to do this myself,” Wiancko says.
But an unlikely collaborator appeared. Last year, Kim Weimer, a Port Angeles contractor with a background in physics and engineering, began taking ceramics classes at Wiancko’s studio.
Weimer and Wiancko clicked artistically. They both wanted to try something new, something big.
Walk into Wiancko’s house, and you see one of the results: a tall, red-brown vessel bearing a black raven. In the studio, more large works await: curvaceous pots depicting more animals, including a clay iguana curled around one.
Weimer started dabbling in clay less than two years ago and took an art class at Peninsula College. He also attended gatherings hosted by Port Angeles sculptors Gray Lucier and Bob Stokes — including one costume party that brought out a previously hidden skill.
For this event, Weimer constructed a papier-mache Sasquatch outfit. Combined with his tall stature, it made an impression.
Friends told him: You should do something with that creativity.
“I’ve always liked to create things, build things,” Weimer says. But his career has ranged from things like teaching computer science at Edmonds Community College to running a small glass contracting firm.
“Art was not a part of my life,” Weimer says.
He and Wiancko began collaborating last October and are now showing their large-scale pots at the RiverSea Gallery, a 3,500-square-foot destination gallery in Astoria, Ore.
They have also established Wiancko Weimer Ceramics, and have numerous works in progress at Wiancko’s Freshwater Bay studio.
To fire their large pots, the two artists have had to stack kilns on top of each other. And they say that Weimer is the engineering department and Wiancko the art department, but of course it’s not so cut and dried.
The two talents overlap, Wiancko says.
“I can spend hours drawing,” and then Weimer can take it from there. “He can make any form, any shape.”
One of their next creations is of a wolf and her cubs, nestled inside a clay vessel. This is a tough image to explain in words, Wiancko adds.
As springtime progresses, the artists are looking forward to fresh inspiration — and more space for finishing their pots.
“We’re planning on putting bigger kilns together,” Wiancko says. Pit-firing is a possibility this summer, while she and Weimer hope to branch out into fountains and other shapes.
“The most satisfaction in this,” Weimer says, “comes from challenging myself to do it better . . . and to do it at all.”
Wiancko is a patient mentor, he says, adding that she is also an artist of great versatility. That’s visible in the ceramic vessels and toruses — circular sculptures — in her living room. Then there are the painted horses, ravens and other creatures at RiverSea and at the Landing Art Gallery in Port Angeles’ The Landing mall.
Weimer, for his part, is most attracted to classical shapes. But “who knows,” he adds, “where I will be in a year?”
The willingness to “try the untried,” as Wiancko says, makes anything possible for an artist, wherever he or she is in life.
“The creative spirit,” she believes, “has many forms.”
