PORT ANGELES — To cap the weeklong Paint the Peninsula competition, the Port Angeles Fine Arts Center is throwing a party in Webster’s Woods, its 5-acre art park, this Sunday.
Admission is free to the event, called the Panache! Festival of Colors, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the meadow and forest beside the arts center, 1203 E. Lauridsen Blvd.
Activities will get going at 10:30 a.m. with a 90-minute “Quick Draw” contest, in which artists from the Panache! plein-air art show can participate.
That free show, open to local painters of all ages, opened last month in the atrium at The Landing mall, 115 E. Railroad Ave., and will stay up through next Friday, Sept. 18.
Awards presentation
Next up Sunday is the 12:30 p.m. awards presentation for the Panache! artists, in which $800 worth of prizes will be awarded.
A free indoor art show will be going on at the fine arts center’s gallery too: freshly painted landscapes from this past week’s Paint the Peninsula contest.
Since Monday, Clallam County has been a canvas for painters from across North America.
Twenty-six of them, from British Columbia, Colorado, Wisconsin, North Carolina, California — as well as from Sequim and Port Ludlow — have spent their days interpreting Olympic National Park, the Dungeness National Wildlife Refuge and other scenic spots.
Their paintings, dozens of them, went on display this week at the Port Angeles Fine Arts Center, and many have already sold.
Sunday’s festival will continue to celebrate the act of outdoor art-making.
From 1 p.m. to 4 p.m., family-friendly activities will include “action painting stations,” as center director Robin Anderson calls them.
Artists roaming the woods
And since artists will be roaming the woods, anyone is invited to wear white to, she adds, “become a human canvas.”
Originally, the festival was to include a fundraising barbecue put on by the fine arts center’s volunteers, but Anderson said this week that that’s been scrubbed.
The workers are tapped out, she said, so visitors are encouraged to instead bring picnics to enjoy in the park.
Following Paint the Peninsula, the fine arts center will prepare for a major transition.
The city of Port Angeles, a longtime funder of the center, will eliminate the director’s $66,000 salary from its 2016 budget. Anderson, who will be out of a job Jan. 1, is looking for work now.
Also, over the next three years, the city will phase out its $27,500 annual contribution to the center’s operating budget.
Port Angeles’ Parks and Recreation Department will continue, however, to maintain the fine arts center’s gallery building and surrounding Webster’s Woods, said Corey Delikat, the department’s director.
Phillis Olson, president of the fine arts center’s foundation board, said she looks forward to being independent of the city.
The center is sustained in part by the Esther Webster trust, a fund set up some three decades ago by Webster, the late artist who wanted Port Angeles to have its own art museum and park.
The board will be seeking grants and other support in the new year, Olson said.
In the face of these cuts and changes, “I’m not negative,” she added.
“I’m excited to move forward.”
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5062, or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
