Sally Pfaff and Barbara Ewing will be the featured artists at the  Port Townsend Gallery for the month of August, the gallery has announced.

Pfaff paints landscape stories that are inspired by her outdoor adventures, and part of her creative process involves letting the paint flow freely to create movement and interesting forms. 

“I work with the paint, at times letting it guide me,” Pfaff explained.

Pfaff primarily paints in acrylic medium, but her background in printmaking adds unique image-making possibilities. 

The first layers are intentionally spontaneous, she noted, and can reveal an interesting subject such as a bird or landscape feature.

She then adds layers of color, as well as shapes, depending on the need for value or form. As the painting transpires, the overall composition begins to emerge, and her imagination and visual memory continually guide the creative process.

Water is often a central theme in Pfaff’s work, and her explorations over the past year continue to be larger, semi-abstract landscapes, that explore water in different forms as it interacts with the landscape. 

Ewing is a ceramic artist who is well known for her functional pieces, including platters, appetizer dishes, bud and standard vases, bottles, sconces, and lamps.

The pieces are made from a variety of mid-range regionally produced clay and glazes. Various colored clay bodies are often glazed with bright and lively colors, and each piece is always enhanced by the impressions made by stamps, stencils, or found objects. Often, pieces are embellished by small additions of clay buttons and strips of clay.  Her decorative themes are abstract, aquatic, floral, and nature’s creatures.

Ewing said she has seen success and failure in her 35 years of making ceramic objects. 

She has enjoyed the long and sometimes frustrating process of making ceramic objects and learning how to do it better, and has ultimately decided that it is the process of making something versus the desire to make it perfectly that motivates her. 

Heat is the miracle that makes it all a success or failure, she added.   

“It can be a joy or sorrow when opening the kiln to view what it has taken you weeks to produce,” Ewing noted. 

“Fortunately, I am blessed with more successes than failures after all this time.” 

The Port Townsend Gallery is located at 715 Water St. and is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily, and by appointment. For more gallery information, call 360-379-8110 or go to porttownsendgallery.com.