is the program that has brought a singular open-air art collection to the former Webster Estate. The total number of artworks that have accumulated in Webster’s Woods Art Park since the inaugural 2000 season has crested at more than one hundred and twenty-five. While over the years many pieces have been returned to their creators or succumbed to the elements, the net presence of art in the park has grown steadily through gift, entrenchment and extended loan.
 Claudia Lorenz, Compost Person
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One of the hallmarks of Art Outside has always been to strive for a balance between sculptural objects and site interventions, with both approaches highly sensitive to the natural environment. The five and a half acres of second-growth forest has been a friendly host to artists’ imaginations. A varied topography that embraces trees and clearing, ridge and hollow, swale and wetland makes for constantly changing sightlines and new landscape frames. Artists are stimulated by our sublime Olympic setting and excited to be able to try out their ideas with the great degree of freedom accorded to them
“Magical, enchanted, whimsical, delightful, transcendent” are a few of the adjectives that escape routinely from the lips of those who walk the discovery trails of this unique “museum without walls.” Recurring declarations by rapturous visitors, promising to mimic this or that artwork in their own backyards, reaffirm the impression that the activities in these Woods communicate on a very fundamental level.
 James Lapp, Canticle
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The greatest charm of Webster’s Woods, no doubt, is the resonance between artists’ ideas and the self-perpetuating landscape. There is a playful and not-always-distinct border between the artists’ creations, the flora and the natural features of this spectacular property. The transitory nature of many of the artworks makes for a visible evolution in the collection, even for the new or infrequent visitor, as marked through the constant changes manifested by the passage of the seasons.
This art has a tendency to make even the most casual observer see nature through a new lens, and in so doing reaches the wellsprings of our connections to the living earth that is often overwhelmed by preoccupations with proxy experiences happening on screens or on the printed page.
2011 SEASON
The 12th season of Art Outside, the Port Angeles Fine Arts Center’s acclaimed program of art in nature premiered on Saturday, June 18. New works by fifteen artists joined more than 100 artworks still on site from previous seasons in the Center’s charming Webster Woods Art Park.
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The artist traveling the gretest distance to bring art to Webster Woods is Pennsylvanian Richard Metz (Erdenheim, PA) who spent ten days in our PA to create ten “woods creatures” on tree trunks throughout the five-acre park. Painted with natural pigments suspended in an egg binder, the bright colors will decay over the course of the season reflecting ever-changing nature.
Metz’s imagination finds his creatures in the leaf shapes of the selected trees and in the bark textures of nearby trees. Inspired by children's book illustrations and the emotional charge of being in the woods, he finds a dialogue developing between him and his creatures and his creatures amongst themselves and with the woods.
David Nechak (Seattle), who has the distinction of being the one artist who has contributed work to the Woods in every season since its inception in 2000, creates a lower key haunting by mounting glass taxidermist’s eyes on a dozen trees peering down on walkers.
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There is a sense of vanished human presence, too, in the works Susan Hazard (Port Townsend) and Pam Hom (Mt. Vernon). Hazard places ghostly whitewashed suitcases in a dark grove as if abandoned by a tribe of mysteriously vanished phantom travelers.
Hom draws from a collection of 700 shoe lasts, the wooden or composite foot forms used by shoemaker’s for building and shaping a shoe, to create a path and to stand and “contemplate” other works in the park.
Jyoti Duwadi, a Nepali artist now living in Bellingham, builds a miniature Himalayan stupa — a sacred place in the woods — with layers of ochre-colored earth, pine tar and aromatic bees wax and beach rocks mounded on a Doko, a Nepali bamboo basket used to transport materials.
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Layering is at the essence of the work of Robert Horner (Port Townsend), an architect and artist who has worked extensively on archaeological digs in Turkey. Inspired by the ruins of pre-Roman architecture, he has constructed a rammed earth wall by layering local soils from the immediate vicinity into a five-foot high freestanding monolith that will evoke both the ancient and the temporal, the natural and the constructed as it erodes over several seasons.
Rebecca Cummins is a photography professor at the University of Washington who is fascinated with early optical discoveries. Her Log Cam wittily joins the logging legacy of the Olympic Peninsula with the camera obscura, a wooden viewing box with a simple lens that Renaissance artist used as a drawing aid to master perspective. The dreamy soft-focus view floating disembodied inside a log mounted on a swiveling post gives the feeling that one has fallen into the rabbit hole, a fitting metaphor for much of the Webster’s Woods experience.
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Dani Lablond’s (Port Angeles) giant “Paul Bunyan” chair looms in a small clearing on the bluff overlooking the city and Steve Satushek’s (Bellingham) twin strands of a giant necklace, comprised of beads made from 12” diameter fir rounds, are strung together over a path like inverted archways.
There is much more with works by Dan Cautrell (Duvall), Ingrid Lahti (Mercer Island), James Lapp (Mt. Vernon), Carolyn Law (Seattle), Alan Lande (Seattle) and Shirley Wiebe (Vancouver, B.C.).
Art Ranger Tours continue through the summer on the first Saturday of each month at 10 am, and on the third Wednesday at 2 pm. Webster Woods is open all daylight hours year round. Admission is free.
Some Remaining Works from Past Seasons
 Carolyn Law, Linger (Sight, Light) |
 Shirley Wiebe, Albino |
