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The Port Angeles Fine Arts Center opens a new decade — the 2010s — with a commemorative glance backward by honoring its founding director, artist Duncan Yves McKiernan — with a retrospective exhibition. A Marriage of Bronze and Water will feature more than 30 bronze sculptures spanning the octogenarian’s career. These will be complemented with the watercolor paintings by his wife and muse, the late Margaret “Peach” McKiernan. The show runs from January 10 – March 7 with an opening reception for McKiernan on January 10, from 2-4 pm.
When he unveiled the dedication plaque he had cast for the Port Angeles Fine Arts Center on November 22, 1986, McKiernan was ushering in a new era for art on the Olympic Peninsula. Gathered in the keyhole courtyard of the former Webster residence were many of the town’s leaders and social elite, here to welcome this charming addition to the City’s cultural landscape.
The initial exhibitor was George Tsutakawa, an iconic Northwest artist whose wizened face beamed with the accrued accomplishments of his heralded career. The organic minimalism of Tsutakawa’s bronzes and the confident linear expressionism of his loaded-brush paintings proved a seamless fit with Paul Kirk’s sweeping but understated mid-century architecture, nestled into an inspirational corona of Olympic nature
Over the next two years at the new Center’s helm McKiernan courted vintage Northwest School heavyweights including La Conner’s Guy Anderson (1987), Portland’s duo of Carl and Hilda Morris (1987) and Victoria’s Elza Mayhew (1988) — regional stars of donor Esther Barrows Webster’s generation. He developed a program of exhibitions that drew on both well-known masters that he succeeded in attracting to Port Angeles and on lesser-known Olympic Peninsula talents. Following the model of the Beaver Hill Art Center, the ad hoc cultural venue that Mrs. Webster materialized from time to time in her final years, he supplemented the visual fare with live performances of musicians and authors. “From these seeds the Center began its growth into a venue with wide regional appeal and significance, the Olympic Peninsula’s art museum,” said Jake Seniuk, McKiernan’s successor in 1989 and curator of the exhibition.
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Following two decades in Aberdeen, on the Washington coast, McKiernan had in 1971 returned to Port Angeles, the place of his birth and youth, to care for his aged mother and disabled brother. On the shores of Grays Harbor he had plied several trades but dedicated himself as much as circumstances allowed to building the Windolee, a 42-foot gaff-rigged schooner. Among the many skills he acquired and honed in his 13-year immersion in shipbuilding, was casting the many fittings and fasteners for the rigging, and he had become totally intrigued by the artistic possibilities of lost-wax casting.
Finding himself back in hardscrabble Port Angeles, McKiernan’s jack-of-all trades persona landed him employment with Esther Webster, who had recently sold the Port Angeles Evening News, the predecessor of today’s Peninsula Daily News. For the last fourteen years of her life McKiernan was her Man Friday, the person who knew most about her aspirations and capacities. Importantly, the position allowed him time and a degree of support in the pursuit of his own art making.
Soon after his return to Port Angeles, McKiernan built a small foundry in an old garage. To further evolve the aesthetic dimension and complement his hard-earned boat casting skills, he began study with Lillian von Hild, an Austrian sculptor who ended her colorful career and diasporic wanderings teaching at Peninsula College, down the street from the Webster House.
“Under Hild’s classical European-style tutelage he worked in clay to create the first of many tabletop sculptures that he went on to cast in bronze in his garage foundry, and later in the larger 300 pound capacity foundry that occupied the lower level of the home he built on the flanks of Beaver Hill, just below the Webster House,” recalled Seniuk.
Working from live models he later produced larger fragmentary female studies such as Torso and Derriere, which conveyed a natural rather than idealized anatomy and emphasized the tactility of female flesh. McKiernan’s interests ranged over time-proven subject matter, that in addition to nudes included portrait heads, animals and natural forms that bordered on abstraction.
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The harsh economics of bronze work induced McKiernan to try his hand at motifs that appealed to populist tastes. “With his Faller and Bucker — a crusty logger leaning on his axe and balancing a two-man saw over his shoulder — he translates a folk art motif into the high art of bronze,” said Seniuk.
“His miniature animal portraits, like Dominant Male Mountain Goat, focus more on attitude than description in their simplified forms. The curled and tucked posture of his Fawn Sleeping captures the essence of ungulate restfulness with a light touch reminiscent of the compassionate animal paintings of German Expressionist Franz Marc.”
Further studies with noted Seattle sculptor Phillip Levine reinforced McKiernan’s explorations of a borderland between depiction and abstraction. Levine’s blocky forms seek a simplification of detail that brings an air of universality to his figures. It is a flavor of modernism that Esther Webster felt close to in her own paintings, and she supported McKiernan’s embrace of that direction.
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Eggplant with Persimmon is perhaps the best known of McKiernan’s tabletop sculptures, having appeared in PAFAC’s Decade (10th anniversary) show and having won Best of Show in 1984’s rendition of Arts in Action on the Port Angeles waterfront. Based on a photo that he took at a dinner party, the squat fruit and voluptuous vegetable present the proverbial odd couple, a yin and yang of complementary and contrasting features, now unified by the untrammeled purity of the cooled bronze.
In 1980 McKiernan’s sleek 7 ½ foot bronze Cormorants was installed at the City Pier as Port Angeles’s first, and arguably its most enduring, piece of public art. “The sinuous and fluid lines of these long-necked harbor denizens and the jet-black simplicity of their graceful attenuated forms reveal an artist conscious of his precedents in Asian art,” noted Seniuk. “McKiernan’s svelte masses capture the sleek aerodynamics of these graceful underwater flyers, who can often be seen atop the pilings a stone’s throw off-shore.”
In 1989 McKiernan created another public project — the Peace Bell — that was commissioned by the State Centennial Committee to represent Clallam County at the Washington Convention and Trade Center in Seattle. There it is part of the Bell Garden, a permanent public art installation by David Mahler, in which the then-Seattle-based composer gathered historic bells from each of the state’s 39 counties and animated their varied peals in periodic performances.
Clallam and a few other counties did not have an appropriate keepsake, so McKiernan was tapped to create one and chose the theme of Peace through Trade, paying tribute to our Pacific partnerships with the Far East. That three-word maxim is inscribed on the face of the bell in five languages — Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Russian and English. At the same time McKiernan created a second casting of the bell for the local community and it is appropriately sited on the harbor shore not far from the Cormorants.
McKiernan’s life-size bronze cougar, his last major work and the largest since Cormorants, uses a sense of naturalism to search for something essential in this magnificent predator’s highly evolved form. Inspired by his observation of a housecat drinking from a pool, he uses that finely balanced pose to capture the rippling grace of the Fire Cat as it leans gingerly forward against gravity for a cool sip. Stationed on a boulder just outside his studio that once contained the now dismembered foundry, it serves as a talisman, a metaphor for a life that like the wildcat’s moved back and forth between territorial roaming and islands of nurture.
“In his golden years that island of nurture was embodied in his wife, Margaret, who passed away last spring,” recalls Seniuk. Nicknamed Peach from her infancy because of her peachy complexion, she was also a native Port Angelean, who had left in her salad days and made a life elsewhere (in San Francisco, then New York City in her case), then returned later in life. Although she received no formal art training, she was always attuned to design and color in the living environments that she fashioned in her various homes. When she became reacquainted with Duncan, his ties to the world of art refueled her passion and she plunged into painting with steady determination.
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For her subjects Peach limited herself largely to things close at hand — still-life compositions of an ensemble of fruit or a grouping of bottles, for example. These non-confrontational subjects avoided the intrusion of a narrative, allowing the viewer to focus on sensation itself and share her delight in color and luminosity. She was captivated by the transparency of watercolors, the way the tones of a scene can be built up in layers that remain self-evident, giving us the sensation of penetration — that we are looking through rather than at the painting.
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“That this delight in how things look, when you look long and hard, was her main motivation is evident in the play of light on common and often banal objects in her watercolors,” observed Seniuk. “In many she allows the aquarelle pigments to soak into the paper and wick down the page to create a feeling of time fleeting, that the things of the material world are but temporary and on the verge of transition or transformation. There is a lightness and effervescence in Peach’s paintings that contrasts and balances the staunch solidity and compressed density of Duncan’s bronzes.”