PORT ANGELES – Walking into this center is taking “a giant step,” as the blues singer Taj Mahal would say, “outside your mind.”
That step is into the minds of young men and women poised on the edge of the world — on the North Olympic Peninsula — and on the brink of the future.
Twenty-six teenagers from Port Angeles, Sequim and Forks unveiled pieces of their minds and hearts in “ArtPaths: Portfolio 2010,” the student art exhibition that opened Sunday at the Port Angeles Fine Arts Center, 1203 E. Lauridsen Blvd.
From one end of the gallery to the other, you’re awash in bold images.
On the western wall is Torrey Jakubcin’s triptych, “Interference,” three panels about how technology — cell phones, iPods, computers you can take anywhere — can distract us from both our inner lives and from the richness of nature.
The first panel is a forest scene, in which medieval hunters are supposed to be locating a white stag. The animal is right there with them. But they can’t see him because they all have cell phones to their ears.
Panel 2 is a Nativity scene, featuring a few modern touches: a shepherd on a cell phone, sheep with human faces and the Virgin Mary with an Apple laptop.
The third panel centers on a Gothic gargoyle, that creature who’s supposed to be a sentinel, or guard — but in this case our gargoyle is wired to an iPod.
“I just want to raise the question about technology, how prevalent it is and what the costs are,” said Jakubcin, a 17-year-old senior at Port Angeles High School.
Jakubcin’s parents, Margaret and Michael, have watched the triptych take shape in their home over the past three months. The house had a room that didn’t get much use, Margaret said, so it turned into their son’s art studio.
“He was a 6-year-old who liked to draw and play with Play-Doh, and a blink later he’s doing this,” said Margaret.
“He could ruffle some feathers with this,” added Michael. “But that is fine with me.”
A Running Start student at Peninsula College, Jakubcin plans to stay there for one more year and then earn a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Western Washington University.
He’s had work in the ArtPaths show in past years, and when a few of the pieces sold, Margaret said, it dawned on him that he could actually make a life as an artist.
A few feet from Jakubcin’s paintings stand strange tributes to marine life, from the hands of Sequim artist Zane Carey.
To make clay look like living tissue, he sculpted tentacled creatures, imbued them with otherworldly color and then bent the shapes to suggest the movement of oceanic waves.
Carey, 18, studied with Sequim High School art teacher Jake Reichner — “he’s awesome” — and got himself into Oregon’s Linfield College, where the ceramics studio is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But rather than an art degree, he’s planning to pursue exercise science and physical therapy.
They’re not unrelated, though; both, Carey said, are about working with his hands.
Reichner, meanwhile, marveled at the accomplishments of Carey and the rest of his art students. After starting Sequim High’s ceramics program from scratch three years ago, he’s watched the participants’ abilities flower in it.
“Being an artist uses all parts of your brain,” Reichner said. One must first develop a concept for the piece; then figure out how to put it together.
In ceramics, a lot can go wrong, he added: things can blow up or crack during shaping and firing. In addition to mastering the craft aspect, you’ve got to put a message out there, to spark emotions in your viewer.
“There’s so much critical, creative thinking going on,” said Reichner. And “in sculpture, none of them is copying anything. It’s really challenging.”
Expressing yourself in clay, glaze, paint or whichever medium you choose is “good for your soul, and good for your brain,” he said.
Looking around the gallery at the students’ creations, Reichner remarked on how students took risks with subject matter that isn’t easy to talk about — or that comes across with more power in images rather than words.
Emily Carel of Sequim, for example, used her artwork to comment on her home town’s transformation from a farmland-rich locale to a hotbed of commercial development.
And Melissa Estrada, who will be valedictorian this June at Forks High School’s commencement, painted “Strawberry Fields Forever,” in honor of her family’s annual migration to pick fruit in the fields outside Bellingham.
“There’s a lot of heart in all of this,” Reichner said.
ArtPaths will be on display through July 4 at the Port Angeles Fine Arts Center.
Admission is always free to the galleries there; the indoor space is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays, while the Webster’s Woods outdoor gallery is open daily from dawn till dusk.
For information, phone 360-457-3532 or visit www.PAFAC.org.
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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.
