WEEKEND: Free tour to show where Port Townsend creativity comes alive

PORT TOWNSEND — If you can, bring a designated passenger and fellow art critic.

That’s the advice from Rae Belkin, spokeswoman for the 38 artists on the Art Port Townsend Studio Tour, a free, movable feast of creativity this weekend. From 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, Aug. 24-25, sculptors, illustrators, leatherworkers and doll makers will open their lairs, as will painters, photographers, potters and mosaic builders. There is no charge to see any of these studios, and a roster and map can be found at the Northwind Arts Center, 2409 Jefferson St., and at www.ArtPortTownsend.org.

With the nature of the tour, Belkin said, it’s good to have a friend in the passenger seat. This friend can help navigate your way to the studios, and once you’ve visited, you and your fellow traveler can turn into art critics.

“You get back in the car and say, ‘What did you think?’” Belkin added.

This is the 15th annual Art Port Townsend event, and it has 15 new artists, she noted. They’re photographer Brett Anniballi, painters Judy Courtwright, Nancy Fredrick, Jason Gould, Evy Olsen Halvorsen, Jean Myers and Sandra Offutt; jeweler Lyn Flaas; ceramists Diane Gale, Gail Hustedde and Megan Smith; letterpress artist Ellie Matthews; doll maker and mixed-media artist Virginia King and woodworkers Paul Kaase and Robert Whitney. They join tour veterans such as poet-photographer Tony Porto and Chuck Iffland, whose Chimacum property is like a bizarre sculpture park.

The artists will not only show off their latest work, said coordinator Melinda Bryden. They will also give demonstrations.

She, for example, will show how she makes her mosaics in her studio at 1221 Woodland Drive in Port Townsend.

Bryden praised her fellow artists such as Gale, who “does the most incredible kiln ceramics” at her studio at 1476 W. U St. in Port Townsend, and Luke Tornatsky, who she said will create drawings of people who come by his place. It’s across town from Gale’s at 804 Tyler St. and one of 27 artist’s studios with a Port Townsend address.

Bryden advises people to spend one of the weekend days in Port Townsend and the other in the surrounding towns.

“If you have just one day,” added Belkin, “get together with the people you’re going to go with” and pick out a manageable route together. Art Port Townsend is bigger than its name, she noted. The tour “takes you into the hinterlands.”