The Old Alcohol Plant Inn hosted the launch of a new creative venue in the community, as the Bayside Art Gallery on site celebrated the opening of “Modern Metamorphoses” with a champagne reception for the public from 4-6 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 8.

The “Modern Metamorphoses” exhibit showcases 40 paintings and sculptures by Mike McCollum and Tracy LeMoine in the Bayside Art Gallery, located on the second floor of the Old Alcohol Plant Inn, at 310 Hadlock Bay Road in Port Hadlock.

Christopher Forrest, art curator and director of retail for the Bayside Art Gallery, credited the artists with winning over the surrounding community for a worthy cause, since proceeds from the sales of works in “Modern Metamorphoses” will go to benefit those experiencing homelessness in Jefferson County, through Bayside Housing and Services.

Forrest chose “Modern Metamorphoses” as the title of the exhibit because “the only thing permanent in nature is continuous change. Our lives are journeys of continuous transformations: the physical, the emotional, of imagination and of spirit. The artworks by these artists explore these changes in disparate and beautiful ways.”

McCollum, whom Forrest described as “a lifelong artist by nature, training and practice,” has been creating and exhibiting his artwork since 1964.

“I start with a basic idea, and then, it’s a matter of rescuing that idea from all the contrived directions it may take me,” McCollum said. “Making art keeps me alive and engaged every day.”

An abstract expressionist, McCollum works in both two- and three-dimensions, and likes to surprise himself by aiming toward, rather than arriving at, an artistic outcome.

Kay Larson of the New York Times wrote, “I like McCollum’s touch, (with its) feathery layering of several different kinds of crayons. Count him among the educated mobility.”

LeMoine is a practicing artist and massage therapist who moved to the area shortly before the COVID pandemic lockdown, but she’s been painting off and on for 50 years.

While trained in several mediums, LeMoine now works exclusively in acrylics, with animals, landscapes, mountains and sunsets serving among her more frequent subjects, as she paints from her own photographs, while also creating portraits of other people’s pets.

“I love living, painting and photographing in the Pacific Northwest,” LeMoine said. “I feel I am free from the stresses of the world when I am creating art.”

Aside from what Forrest characterized as “the usual ebullient responses of support” for the artists, he noted that the artworks themselves have received specific kinds of responses.

“Tracy’s paintings are likely to tap an emotional response, through her use of color and composition, which in the case of her landscape painting, titled ‘Blazing,’ can be triggering for some, who have lived through one of the wildfire events that plague our West Coast summers,” Forrest said. “It’s certainly not the intention of the artist to elicit such a strong reaction, but it is a testament to the power a painting can hold for the viewer.”

Forrest also attested to how many viewers have been eager to touch McCollum’s sculptures, with their “satiny wood surfaces,” in order to “decipher the colorful and enigmatic panels” that decorate McCollum’s boxes, “like expressionistic riddles.”

Forrest asserted that McCollum’s artworks “playfully bridge the space between painting and sculpture, as well as art and utility,” and as such, the Bayside Art Gallery “encourages gentle touching of his sculptures, and lifting the lids to peer inside of them, which can be surprising to people who are so used to never being allowed to touch the art in a gallery or museum.”