PORT TOWNSEND — Gallery 9, home of the North Olympic Artist Cooperative, is featuring Roberto Costas Ribiero’s jewelry and Michael Hale’s acrylic paintings this month.
The gallery, at 1012 Water St., is open six days a week — closed on Tuesdays — from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Monday.
Costas Ribiero has been making jewelry for 28 years. He learned the basics of silversmithing from a friend in Brazil, where he was born and raised but had no formal instruction, gallery organizers said.
He developed his own style and techniques, and he still learns primarily by experimentation, taking the concept of “homemade” to a whole new level, crafting each clasp, hoop, post and bezel individually.
His exhibit at the gallery is a selection of earrings, rings, pendants, bracelets and necklaces.
“A long walk in the woods is sure to bring inspiration into the workshop,” he has said.
During the pandemic, he was able to spend extra time in the workshop, finding new ways to incorporate recurring circle and spiral motifs that find their way into his pieces, he said.
Hale was born in the Pacific Northwest and has been at his art since the time he could hold a pencil and later a brush.
Majoring in his second love of architecture, he attended Washington State University, where he minored in fine art. He found architecture too ridged and switched to a commercial art program at the Burnley School of Professional Art in Seattle.
After a three-year stint in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War, he went back to school at The Museum Art School in Portland, Ore., where he resumed his studies in commercial and fine art.
Taking his knowledge of building and marrying it with his architectural training and his skill of art, Hale started an architectural rendering business, first in the Northwest and then in the Phoenix area.
In Los Angeles in the early ’90s, he was a scenic artist for various movie and scenic production studios, working on everything from movie sets to stage drops to cruse ship productions.
Influenced by Maxfield Parrish and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Hale geared much of his work toward fantasy landscapes, organizers said.
That changed when he moved to Port Townsend in 2000.
“There was just too much of everything to paint here: the water, the mountains, the boats and, yes, that grand old architectural element of buildings … beautiful, red-bricked buildings,” he said.
Ever since, that’s the subject he’s painted the most, a close second being the masts and the sails of wooden boats moored at Port Townsend.
“What inspires me to paint over all these years is to share what I see with others according to my particular view of a subject,” he said.
For more information, see www.gallery-9.com.
Roberto Costas Ribier crafts each piece of his jewelry individually.
