The silver wings spread across the courtyard, the surface reflecting glints of the sun. Suspended into the air, the mechanical creature looked ready to flap its steel appendages and take flight in a concert of metallic clangs and shrieks.
“Soaring Eagle II” is poised to take flight, positioned above the back patio at the Port Townsend Gallery on Water Street.
“My names are not very imaginative,” the artist laughed.
But his artwork is.
From eagles soaring in place and condors attacking midair to hummingbirds sipping from gramophone-esque flowers and quail anxiously hurrying across the ground, when it comes to sculpting fowl Coupeville-based artist Greg Neal takes like a duck to water.
When asked “Why birds?,” he said: “Obviously, I like birds.”
It’s the flight and the movement, he explained.
“I’d like to do figurative things, you know, like human figures, but the shapes are very complicated. It makes it very difficult to form sheet metal to the shape of a face,” he said.
“Birds are a simpler shape and I like simple shapes, anyway.”
Neal said his art is guided by a combination of being able to create figures in the medium as well as a fondness of the subject matter.
“I could do fish, but they’re boring, I think,” he joked.
His work sculpting winged creatures began a couple of years ago. The steel birds he created were displayed for a while on his front lawn. But eventually his wife, Rose, mentioned how the yard was getting crowded with his metallic creations.
Port Townsend Gallery had the space, however, in its back courtyard to accommodate the multitude of wing spans.
Neal’s birds have been popping up there since August 2020.
“That’s my biggest piece yet,” he said of the freshly assembled eagle’s 16-foot wingspan.
The figures are stainless steel. Regular steel corrodes, he said, and you can’t really stop it.
“And I like shiny.”
“So I switched to stainless steel — which is a lot more expensive and it’s a bit more difficult to work — but I prefer the end result,” he noted.
Neal uses a plasma cutter to cut the pieces for his artworks. It makes a jet of hot plasma that cuts through sheet metal “like a hot knife through butter,” he said.
A grinder is used to make a surface finish. A MIG welder is then used to weld the pieces together.
His inspiration is the motion, “a dynamic type of motion.”
“I try to get that in the pieces,” the artist explained. “I try to have them doing something that’s very central to that particular bird.”
He said he hopes viewers of his work will take away a feeling of awe for nature, and an appreciation for the animal. And maybe something else.
“I hope they go away with the actual piece,” Neal said.
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Birds take flight at Port Townsend Gallery - Port Townsend Leader
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