In Search of Safe Harbor

In 1791, when the Spanish explorer Francisco de Eliza sailed down the Strait of Juan de Fuca and into a deep harbor cradled inside a protective natural sand spit, he named the site Puerto de Nuestra Señora de Los Angeles — the harbor of our Lady of Angels. Among the first, he was by no means the last, to rhapsodize about this idyllic spot where the mountains meet the sea, and where the two are separated only by a sliver of flatlands on which a small city might thrive.

Later shortened and Anglicized to Port Angeles, that harbor — which is now a haven for mammoth tankers, cargo ships, log ships, the occasional cruise ship and an international ferry — remains integral to the identity of the city it spawned.

A couple of miles to the east, at the mouth of Ennis Creek, the future of a second sheltered bay — flanked by a shoreline still contaminated with the residue of a dismantled mill — indeed the fate of the Port Angeles waterfront in general is a topic presently on many local people’s minds. It is a good moment to think about harbors.

As both noun and verb, the word harbor carries a host of freighted meanings, among them:

• n. a sheltered port where ships can take on or discharge cargo

• n. a place of refuge, comfort and security

• v. to shelter secretly (e.g. fugitives or criminals)

• v. to maintain (a theory, thoughts, or feelings)

In an age where new threats captivate mass consciousness without pause, the theme of Safe Harbor is especially ripe for a broad range of interpretations, many of which have no direct connection to marine moorage, yet maintain a metaphoric link to the sea.

We offered the rubric safe harbor as a catalyst to launch artists’ exploration and we received responses from seventy creators employing a variety of media. Of these we selected works from thirty-seven, aiming to sample the breadth of ideas and approaches represented in this field.

Given the limits of our exhibition space, the short timeline leading up to the show and the vastness of the theme, we have no doubt just begun to scratch the surface of this deep notion that is Safe Harbor.

Breathtaking aerial views of the Olympic Peninsula made by pilot/photographer, Dave Woodcock (Sequim), parcel out verdant slices of this crisp, cool Eden (see p.3). His low-flying perspective on Crescent Bay reveals a quintessential safe harbor along this pristine strand of the Salish Sea.

The C-shaped bay rolls up to a deserted white sand beach that is ringed by forest. A rocky shoal and a precipitous island just a few yards off shore offer an invitation of solitude and exploration.

In contrast Woodcock’s eagle’s-eye view of the city sprawling along Port Angeles Harbor reveals an uneasy truce between the cool blue waters and the press of human population.

Paul Blake’s (Sekiu) Peer Pressure moves our vantage below the surface, where the harbor is teeming with the dense rush of life. Printed using the traditional Japanese Gyotaku method of pulling images directly from inked fish, the silvery bodies of migrating salmon move from artistic invention to hard evidence, their existence verified by the direct impressions of their bodies on the paper.

Surface and depth strike a yin/yang balance in Eva Sköld Westerlind’s (Kirkland) poetic photographs taken at the waterline. Using selective soft focus and a muted palette of sparkling marine light, she creates dreamy visions where the trivial tracks of nature — a lost feather, a stranded mossy stone — are imbued with a feeling of self-awareness, and take on a noble monumentality against the vaporous backdrop.

In contrast the muscular geometry of the industrialized urban waterfront in Suze Woolf’s (Seattle) glowing watercolors, celebrates the economic lifeblood brought by marine commerce. Her cargo ship bedecked with a dense grid of stacked steel containers, and the gangling gait of towering cranes unloading goods from China, evoke the flash and grit of the workaday harbor.

The harbor has disappeared in Kathleen Faulkner’s (Anacortes) oil pastel triptych looking down on Port Angeles from the Center’s perch on Beaver Hill. Mounted in the exhibition above the north facing panoramic windows that inspired her, Faulkner has beaten a retreat to this hilltop safe sanctuary and only depicted the edges of the nest — a ring of friendly trees segueing into the whimsical sculptural interventions of Webster’s Woods.

The world below and its travails are lost in fog, for the moment invisible from this — PAFAC founder Esther Webster’s own safe harbor.

Fog takes on mythic dimensions in maritime photographer Michael Berman’s (Port Ludlow) Luminous Morning, in which the calm open water before our prow is swallowed in a shimmering mist clinging to the surface. We could be in any historical epoch, where men adrift upon an unknown sea have sought out the safety of harbors.

The tightly cropped black sails isolated against the sky, which comprise another of Berman’s crisp images, seem to exist in a moment of antiquity, conjuring the scene when Theseus sailed safely into Athens Harbor after having slain the Minotaur, but flashed the wrong homecoming signal, prompting his pining father to throw himself into the sea in grief.

With swirling chiseled strokes and the outlines of totemic spirits imbedded in his every landmass, Jeffree Stewart’s (Olympia) archetypal fishing scene, descriptively titled Night Radiant River, Father and Son, is grounded in mythologies closer at hand. Empathically summoning the nature-centered sensibility of the Pacific Northwest’s original inhabitants, Stewart’s vision is nevertheless tempered by a strain of Western Romanticism manifested in “modern primitive” notions, dear to a stream of later arrivals drawn to search for safe harbor in this upper-left hand corner by the raw power of the Cascadian landscape.

The aboriginal past meets modern contemporary along the Juan de Fuca shore in Al Williams’ (Victoria, BC) large hardedge, smooth brushed acrylic canvas. Titled 2048, the year of the artist’s centenary, a silent harbor and deserted beach is strewn with clues from our present time, now past, and rendered with CGI precision. Like relics of a disappeared civilization — a fallen totem pole, a driftwood jumble of perfectly milled logs, an orphaned doorway jutting from the sand — these are arrayed as in a museum diorama that has been reduced to its elemental geometric forms.

Aaron Hartzell’s (Seattle) photographic diptych juxtaposes a confetti of stars in the open night sky with a hastily framed claustrophobic image of a figure ascending an outside staircase against the faux brick wall of a motel-style apartment building. In its pairing of macrocosm and microcosm, the parallel images equate the vastness of the universe and the tininess of the individual in whose consciousness — in whose personal safe harbor — the whole thing resides.

The stars that demarcate the constellation Cassiopeia form the connect-the-dots nodal points in Mark Twain Stevenson’s (Port Townsend) stainless steel stick figure homage to the seated goddess, who inspired a discovery of safe harbor in the artist’s youth. Sailing with his father through a starry moonless night on the Great Lakes, the lad recognized the wrong position of Cassiopeia in the sky and realized that because they had mistaken receding boat lights for shore lights they were 180 degrees off their intended course, and needed to reverse direction to find a safe harbor at dawn.

The cardinal points of the compass are one association for a grouping of four of Anne Hirondelle’s (Port Townsend) Blinds. In her continued exploration of the hollow clay form beyond the historic functionality of vessels, Hirondelle has created a series of ceramic hemispheres pierced by apertures of various architectural shapes that recall windows. Like inverted birds’ nests these orbs are miniature observation bunkers, safe harbors into which the viewer can project unconscious attention, then peer back from the depths to observe the self watching the self.

Other conceptual notions of safe harbor may be inferred from the abstract works of Holly Martz (Bremerton) and Melinda Hannigan (Seattle). Martz’s encaustic painting, Safety in Numbers, takes the form of a three-dimensional cross, whose surface is encrusted edge-to-edge with integers that seem to have been lifted from a vast series stretching far beyond the confines of her shaped canvas. Their crowded alignment alludes to both the security we seek in religious faith (the cross) and the empirical thinking (mathematics) that powers technology.

Hannigan’s painting, Crosscut, presents a cluster of circles composed in a variety of weights, sizes, textures and concentricities. A deconstructed mandala of sorts, the composition suggests schematics diagrams or maps, and natural phenomena such as tree rings or standing wave patterns — all expressions of the holistic power of the circle as a symbol of affirmation and completeness, a floating zone of safety.

As the day needs the night to recognize itself, a safe harbor needs an awareness of threat to know that it is safe. Several artists concern themselves with the defilement or the absence of a state of safeness. Bryn Barnard (Friday Harbor), who has illustrated many historical scenes of natural and manmade calamities for a series of self-authored books for young readers, paints the aftermath of the great typhoon of 1284 in Imari Bay, Japan. Titled Kamikaziing Kublai Khan it depicts the Khan’s invasion fleet annihilated by winds that have filled the bay with the fleet’s twisted wreckage and restored that harbor’s safeness.

Karen Hackenberg’s (Port Townsend) gouache Watershed series addresses despoilment of the ocean with the detritus of consumer culture. In each panel a trash artifact, which the artist has found washed up on the beach near her home, is posed against the tide line that delivered it. An empty Talking Rain water bottle, a white striped car tire, a toy hand grenade — thrown away items grown to monumental scale by her worm’s eye vantage point — loom overpoweringly over the pristine sheltered waters.

In Polly Purvis’s (Seattle) Distilled a dozen pieces of vintage glass laboratory equipment (separatory funnels, flasks, tubes and cylinders) are suspended from the ceiling. Like a moonshiner’s still some of this glasswork houses contaminants typical of a modern harbor — fluorescent antifreeze, black motor oil, white plastic grocery bag shards — while some others display specimens of poisoned tidal plants and pollutant-disfigured marine life.

No stranger to the image of the Great Flood in his vast satiric oeuvre, Jack Gunter (Camano Island) moves the scene from the Biblical past to the globally warmed future. With Seattle’s Space Needle and downtown skyscrapers barely keeping their crowns above the rising tide, Gunter paints a watery realm wherein the harbor is now the default domain, safe or not.

With her Sea Tales series of prints Cosette Dudley (Port Angeles) sets her gaze firmly upon the past and her sailing adventures on the Salish Sea. One titled “The Sea has never been friendly to Man…” No Safe Harbor presents a central murky photo etching of a lone rowboat approaching one of several small wooded islands sometime in the vanished era when the photogravure was a new medium. Surrounded with swirling ink washes that lap like waves at manuscript pages scattered in the surrounding sea, and filled with rolling currents of cursive text that quote a Joseph Conrad short story at length, the work has the feel of a diary, now locked in the safe harbor of memory’s vault.

The sky and seabed are Safe and Unsafe zones respectively in Karen DeWinter’s (Seattle) neo-primitive mixed media assemblage painting. Using the conceit of a game board she connects the two realms with a tile path upon which plastic pawns can move back and forth according to the dictates of the spinner on a wheel of chance mounted to the painting’s face. The choices are few and the rules are not revealed. Is safe or unsafe purely a game of luck?

Inspired by the ongoing BP Gulf Coast debacle, David Eisenhour’s (Port Hadlock) found object sculpture, The HMS Progress, provides a pithy icon for an oil-fueled Armageddon. Like a fallen horseman of the apocalypse, a life-size modeling skeleton is wrested from the sanctuary of the artist’s studio and now clutches a kayak paddle, skimming the oil-fouled waters (implied by the marbling of the gallery’s polished concrete floor) in a pram fashioned from an electric blue 55-gallon oil drum.

Michael Paul Miller’s (Port Angeles) disturbing trompe-l’oeil oil painting, Descent, is a more deliberate doomsday scenario writ miniature upon the harbor. A small arms bullet, inflated to the size of a B-52 bomber’s payload by the artist’s extreme close-up viewpoint, plummets down upon a dark and tranquil bay. A fiery dawn (or is it distant fires?) breaks on the horizon, lending dim illumination to this moment of impending cataclysm that will try this quiet harbor’s safeness.

An antidote of sorts to theses fatalistic visions is Maxine Martell’s (Coupeville) large canvas entitled Midnight. A somnambulist’s vision of safe harbor, it presents a large rescue blanket held ready by a squad of ghostly white-suited firemen, who stand by as if to catch and save the dreamer from any rude intrusions of the force of gravity that might invade her flights of nocturnal fantasy.

Of course, if one cannot find a safe harbor one might try to construct one’s own. Kiefer Klein (Port Angeles) has used the vardo or traditional gypsy wagon home as a container for her bliss. Her miniature wagon shrine is festooned with mementos and photos of her beloved Romani grandmother, gathering together her ancestral pride and solidifying the artist’s own sense of self-empowerment, her safe harbor.

The tail end of a modern day vardo is the subject of Terry Leness’s (Port Townsend) photorealist painting of an Aloha brand vacation trailer, the kind that is perceived as a safe harbor by many of today’s leisure travelers. Parked at the curb in a bland and soulless city streetscape with its curtain drawn, it is a hermitage on wheels separated from the perils of the road by only a thin sheet metal skin.

Matthew Olds (Vashon Island) has expressed his interest in the private second life of dilapidated public structures through actual reconstructions using salvaged materials from abandoned sites. From these he develops constructivist paintings in whicha maze of overlapping straight lines sorts itself into architectonic layers. Couched in a faintly suggested underlying landscape, the scribed vectors of an engineered plan share common space with the painted likeness of a stilt house cobbled together from old 2 x 4s without regard to codes or convention.

If Olds’ reconstructed wood butcher’s nests are a pennywise refuge, Harold Nelson’s (Port Townsend) Big Yacht is more like a software billionaire’s hideaway. Fueled by the glut of printed images readily available at little cost, collagist Nelson’s paper and glue concoctions are packed with kaleidoscopic detail to the point of retinal overload. With the decks of several dozen yachts piled one atop another this cruiser seeks to insure a safe harbor by filling that harbor stem to stern with its immense bulk.

A more modest mansion retreat takes center stage in Frank Samuelson’s (Port Townsend) painting All Under a Starry Sky. Raised high on a post against the midnight backdrop of the harbor like some presidential aviary, this miniature White House is the nucleus of a peaceable kingdom in Cascadia, ringed by twinkling stars, ship lights on the harbor and constellations of pink rhododendron blooms. A bird and cat peer out at the water with their backs towards us, oblivious of one another in the sweet harmony of a summer night.

Like the seminal Generation-X anthem from which its title is derived, Grant Watson’s (Victoria, BC) sculpture, Private Idaho, is more about a state of mind than a locale in the Gem State. Comprised of a heavy duty elliptical steel marine float resting at a rakish angle on a complex stand assembled from sundry found machine parts that have been coated with a rusty ceramic glaze, it resembles a flattened and featureless world globe mounted on a gear works driven by arcane technology. Or is it a floating harbor mine set to detonate by the inscrutable designs of an alien reason? The artist’s willful obfuscation of the true nature of his materials and purpose through convincing craftsmanship and design speaks to the temporality and fragility of the cocoons of ideology that we accept as our personal safe harbors, living in our own private Idaho.

The womb is, undoubtedly, our first experience with safe harbor. In her sculpture, Motherland, Mary Coss (Seattle) conflates the human body and its planet home. Plaster cast from her own pregnant torso, the swollen abdomen is like a globe overlayed with a relief map of the British Isles and Normandy, the homelands to which the coming baby’s protective lineage can be traced.

With lush patinas and a great sensitivity to form, Roy Peratrovich (Bainbridge Island) takes a highly sentimental subject such as a momma polar bear with cub — which could easily stray into the hackneyed realm of Hallmark kitsch — and creates tabletop bronzes that breathe with freshness and compassion. What safer harbor could there be than the loving embrace of the she bear for her future replacement as they drift on a floe in an ice-clogged bay?

The purity of the parental bond between the experienced and the innocent is caught in Robert Dash’s (Indianola) snapshot of a bearded man snuggling a small child, their pressed together faces of distinctly different races, making it clear that if they share any common ancestry it is many generations in the past. The personal safe harbor that is the good fortune of the adopted child is matched by the safe harbor of the father’s newly established future legacy that will reach beyond his death.

Susan Melrath’s (Redmond) style of reductive figuration wrests emotion from her subjects with bold volumes of color and pattern rather than with descriptive detail. In the safe harbor of a birthday party, her faceless celebrants are expressions of archetypal roles in the nuclear family. That is not a specific child readying to blow out eight candles on the cake but the embodiment of unconditional acceptance.

The emotional edges of the safe haven of parental nurture are tested by Pat De Caro (Seattle) in a series of snappy charcoal encounters between a young girl and the large looming shadow cast by her teddy bear. In a moment poised between innocence and her growing awareness of vulnerability, she stands spotlit in unselfconscious childish nakedness silhouetted against the inky projections of a monster of the mind, who has entered the room and commandeered the shape of the hapless Mr. Cuddles.

That safe harbors are often constructs of the mind, and as such can prove to have the exact opposite effect on the body, is brought home by Seattle artists Kelly Lyles and Iskra Johnson. Lyles’s zzzzzzz presents the blue light scene of a drunken reveler, passed-out and sprawled across a tavern table in the fog of inebriation that serves him as a safe harbor of sorts.

In Johnson’s series of mixed-media drawings depicting female suicide bombers, one asks the question in its title, What Does Heaven Look Like? Huddled in her burka that conceals the payload connected by a looping wire to the detonator in her hand, she is silhouetted against a gaseous void, in her mind already in the safe harbor that her religion assures as the outcome of the impending martyrdom that will wipe her from the earth.

In the end and on this plane/plain safe harbor is a form of real estate. Heather Joy’s (Vashon Island) ongoing Land Grab series is drawn from images snapped through coach class airliner windows on her business and personal travels. Her 5” x 5” standardized photos map man-manipulated landscapes including farms, cities, and housing tracts as well as shorelines and harbors. Arranged in a checkerboard grid they read as parcels for the auction block. Hung in a large picture window of the Webster House, they engage the real landscape seen spread out behind them and in the town below with alternate growth scenarios, posing questions about the permanence of what we fancy as the safe harbor of our settled homes.

Then, of course, there is the safe harbor of financial security. Seattle conceptual artist Alan Lande addresses the ongoing viability of non-profit cultural institutions by purchasing a $100 government I-Bond, purported to be the safest of investments. Framed on the wall with the image of Martin Luther King, Jr. on the certificate, it serves both as a precisely quantified investment gift towards the Center’s ongoing economic viability in uncertain times and as a symbolic incentive to encourage others to have a dream and support the visions that artists brings to the heart of a community, creating the safe harbor of a strong and unifying culture.

As the BC/Washington inland waters are now collectively known.

When he forgot to rig the white sails in a predetermined sign of success, his father the king seeing the black sails that were to signal his son’s death, threw himself into the sea in grief.

The lands of the Pacific Northwest from Northern California through British Columbia, between the Cascade Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, explored in last year’s exhibition “Envision Cascadia.”