PORT TOWNSEND — This is the time, the artist believes, to come into the forest. Listen for the owl’s wings. Stand close to the trunk of a fragrant cedar, and breathe.
“To be out there,” painter Patricia Hagen said, “there’s something it does to your soul.”
“Into the Woods,” Hagen’s new one-woman show, opens Thursday at Northwind Art’s Jeanette Best Gallery, bringing together 40 of her most recent paintings. Many were done en plein air, so Hagen will put up a map in the gallery that shows where she started painting them — places including the forest near her home in Port Townsend, and on the trail near Tamanowas Rock in Chimacum.
The public is invited to explore the show — designed to feel like a walk on a forest path — at the nonprofit gallery at 701 Water St. Gallery hours are from noon to 5 p.m. Thursdays through Mondays.
A celebration of “Into the Woods” will be part of First Saturday Art Walk from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. June 7, and then Hagen will give a free artist talk at 3 p.m. June 8. The exhibit will stay on view through July 7.
Together with the Jefferson Land Trust, Hagen will guide two family plein air art classes in Chimacum’s Valley View Forest. The class will be offered at 10 a.m. June 14 and again on June 21. For more information, visit saveland.org/events.
Hagen, who moved to Port Townsend four years ago, is a native of the Northwest, and spent part of her youth in Portland, Ore. She earned two art degrees, a bachelor’s at Ohio’s Miami University and then her master’s at California College of the Arts’ Oakland campus. And she’s been walking, playing and painting in the woods for a good long time.
With her art, Hagen hopes to help people connect with the natural world — a balm for when we feel stressed and alone. Her own walks, on the Peace Mile Trail at Fort Worden State Park, in Chimacum’s Valley View Forest, and on the trails just beyond her doorstep, fill her cup with inspiration.
Paintings such as “Night Watch,” “The Fawn,” and “New Year/New Growth,” reflect that, with their images of forests, sky, bodies of water, birds, deer, humans and other animals.
Yet Hagen doesn’t shy away from the reality of destruction. She faces it in her art. She also paints regrowth, often with a human in the frame.
“The figure may be autobiographical, or a kind of every-woman,” said Margy Lavelle, who shows Hagen’s work at Edison’s i.e. gallery in Skagit County.
“The person is in nature, observing or communing, sometimes dwarfed by the setting, the grandness,” Lavelle noted.
“There is both intimacy and witnessing taking place. There is solitude but never aloneness here. The deep connection is what Hagen is reminding us of.”
Hagen said she does fear for the survival of the trees. She’s heartened lately, though, by the Jefferson Land Trust’s work to preserve the forests and farmland around us.
The artist has explored those places, hiking the public trails and marveling as though she just arrived here.
“The essence of my work is an exploration of this delicate dance between humanity and nature,” Hagen said.
We are not mere observers, she believes. It’s high time for us to be protectors.
“Nature reveals itself,” she writes, “as both nurturing and commanding, whether viewed from a mountain peak or an ancient forest path.”
Patricia Hagen’s one-woman show, “Into the Woods,” includes “New Year/New Growth” and about 35 other works. The exhibit, at Northwind Art’s Jeanette Best Gallery in Port Townsend, features plein air paintings made in local forests. (Patricia Hagen)
