Artist Michael Hale draws on his background as an architect to capture Port Townsend scenes – including its boats – with accuracy.

On a recent afternoon he was working on a 4-foot by 4-foot acrylic painting of the James Swan Hotel from a photo taken during the Wooden Boat Festival, with a clutch of gleaming varnished daysailers in the foreground and the peaks of a circus-like tent lending a festive air.

“I like painting in squares,” he said, though it's considered a challenging shape for a good composition.

“Challenge is fun," he said. "If it’s not frustrating, it’s not fun ... That’s why I think all artists, writers, creators have an advantage when they get older. They won’t just be sitting on a beach or mowing a lawn … they’re going to be creating.”

A challenge he's set for himself is to add more emotion to his paintings. “The older I get, the more I find truth and emotions are the same," said Hale, 67. "I know more about life, and … want to put emotions, feelings in paintings.” He’s trying to find “the right combination of being exact and truthful with emotions.”

He’s also starting to play with wavy lines. He points to a painting, called "Four Boats and Motor," of a daysailer that he rendered in exact, faithful proportion, but the edges of the boat are done in wavy lines instead of straight lines. “You don’t have to be so exact,” he said. “You can be exact in color and play with that, not just purely duplicate something.”

Hale also paints portraits and fantasy landscapes, but “boats make the most money,” he said, meaning his paintings of boats, which sell for anywhere from $500 to $5,000. He received the latter figure from a Bainbridge Island restaurant owner for a 4-foot by 8-foot painting of the schooner Pacific Grace, a view that zeroes in on the furled mainsail’s mast hoops and the boom-end of the foresail, bathed in golden morning light.

He earned $1,500 for the image he created for the 2003 Wooden Boat Festival poster. One of the festival's only horizontal images, it shows the bowsprit of a local boat called Able, with varnished trim shining as it cuts through the water, jib dropped and resting in loose folds above the white bowsprit netting.

More boat fest images may be in the offing; Hale submitted an image of a sailboat at sunset for the 2015 festival, and was told it would be perfect for the festival’s 40th anniversary in 2016.

He's not a sailor, but he gets boats' details right. He works from photographs, sometimes manipulating or combining images on his computer before drawing them on canvas. Sometimes he uses a projector. For the Swan Hotel painting, he used a long ruler to help transfer the image.

“It’s my architecture in me. I’ve got to make it look right,” he said.

His artistic influences include Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Maxfield Parrish. “I love [Parrish's] shadows.” People look at Hale’s fantasy-landscapes and say they look like Parrish. Hale said he wants to paint places that the viewer sees and “they just want to be in there because it’s so cool.”

A recent series of fantasy landscapes called "Playing in Earth Sphere" shows bodies of fish, pigs, and naked people flying through the magical world of an "inner Earth." He also imagined an entire universe for his book, which published last fall: “Antiqueus: Quest of the Mazzergast,” a young-adult fantasy novel that includes several black-and-white images.

LIFE'S JOURNEYS

“That’s why I came here, just to write the book that was based on a painting I'd done years earlier,” he said.

Hale moved to Port Townsend in 2000, when an old girlfriend who knew his current landlord, Tony Larson, let him know about the high-ceilinged apartment above the Uptown Pub where he still lives and paints. His third wife, Mazzie, joined him there in 2007.

Hale grew up Catholic, the eldest of five – “I’m the weird one,” he said – graduating from Enumclaw High School in 1966. He studied architecture and art at Washington State University for two years, then went to the Burnley School of Fine Art in Seattle for a year and a half. He was drafted in 1970 and enlisted as a photo-lab technician in the U.S. Army, spending three years in Worms, Germany. Then he went to Portland’s Museum Art School for four years, stopping “just shy of a certificate. So I went out and started pounding nails.” His dad was also a carpenter.

Hale built houses for 10 years. “I liked that. It’s like building a big sculpture and you get to walk through it.” And he “got a lot of painting done” on the side. He also sold fish and went to bartending school.

He moved to Tempe, Arizona, where he was given a free place to live for a while in exchange for building a bar in someone’s house. He also taught architectural rendering and art at Phoenix Institute of Technology.

“Teaching at PIT was great because all my students called me Mr. Mike,” he said. He liked “teaching people who say they can’t paint or draw. Just encourage them and validate them for it,” and they come around, he said.

In 1985, he started an architectural rendering firm in Phoenix, but “slowed down after eight years.” He moved to Los Angeles, worked as a scenic artist in Hollywood.

GALLERIES & GROCERIES

Hale said he used to sell paintings at the Artist’s Edge gallery downtown, and at Water Street Brewing Co. “When that closed, it really ate my market up.”

He still sells work at the Uptown Pub, where his work is sometimes confused with that of Andrew Sheldon, another painter of realistic local scenes. “If I don’t take the space, Andrew takes it,” he said.

“Andrew is looser than me, which I like," Hale said. "I’m always trying to get looser. He took mine one better, he made it nice and loose.”

Hale is on the waiting list for space at Gallery 9, a cooperative at 1012 Water St., Port Townsend. Gallery 9 charges artists a small monthly fee and takes a 20 percent commission, to pay for rent and utilities, explained gallery manager Nancy Eifert.

"It's an affordable way for artists to sell, where they're not paying the 50-60 percent [commission] of a normal gallery," Eifert said. Gallery 9 shows about 24 artists in their two-floor, 2,500 square-foot space.

Hale also works three days a week in Safeway’s produce department, mainly for the benefits, he said. As a veteran, he doesn't need them, but he does it for his wife, Mazzie. The pay is terrible, he said, but “it’s a good job, gets me out,” He’d become a “recluse” working on his book, he said. “They want artists to work in produce,” he said, because they care about how all the colors of the fruits and vegetables go together.

“I don’t like money as a motivator,” he said. “I know I’m good enough. Money’s not a motivator for me, it’s doing the work, doing a good job. You just keep pushing paint around” until it’s right.