PORT TOWNSEND — The Port Townsend Gallery has reopened its Garden Gallery with limited hours through July.
The gallery at 715 Water St. is open from noon to 5 on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.
Featured artists in the garden gallery that reopened July 3 are metal sculptor Greg Neal and Karen Sisk, who creates mobiles.
Neal was born in England in 1954. He followed a career in electronics and is listed as the inventor on 16 U.S. patents. An engineer by nature with an artistic streak, he considered the internal structure of code, and the design of electronic circuits, to be an art form, said gallery owner Mitchel Osborne.
But it was an art form with a ridiculously small audience, Osborne said.
Neal spent years playing with drawing, painting, and various forms of sculpture, including optical plexiglass, and life casting. In 2016 he took early retirement and moved to Whidbey Island where he has devoted himself to welded steel and stainless-steel sculptures.
The earlier steel sculptures were built from mild steel sheet welded to a steel rod armature, then clear-coated, Osborne said.
But the desire for a more “bare metal” look, and the wish to build larger pieces for outside led him to switch to stainless steel, even though it is more expensive and much harder to work, Osborne said.
So far, Neal’s focus has been on creating birds, trying to express their compound curves and give a sense of motion — “attempting to describe what the bird is about,” Osborne said.
His larger pieces are built to be placed either inside or outside. The mild steel ones will develop a patina over time, but the stainless steel one should stay unchanged for an exceptionally long time, Osborne said.
When Sisk hikes in mountains, deserts, or goes to the beach, she looks for wood, Osborne said, adding that the pieces must be “finished,” or they are thrown back into the environment to work out rough edges.
“When she puts a mobile together, the components need to talk to each other and tell a story,” Osborne said.
“A balanced tale is grounded by gravity but agile enough to create negative and positive spaces with gentle unencumbered movement if placed by a window.
Sisk has said she finds them useful for meditation as the changing shapes attract and hold the eye.
When someone purchases a mobile, it is a great compliment but also a loss because Sisk can’t keep a copy or make a duplicate, Osborne said.
There are nine or ten hanging in her home.
“She cannot imagine coming into a room and these familiar mobiles not being there,” Osborne said.
For more gallery information, phone 360-379-8110 or see www.porttownsendgallery.com.
Karen Sisk’s mobiles created with natural pieces are on display in the Port Townsend Gallery’s Garden Gallery.
