It’s hard to know where the creative impulse will take a person.
For Dana Weir ’01 and her spouse Brian Kay ‘01, it has led to Port Townsend, on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, a matchless place where Victorian architecture surveys the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and mountains stand on two horizons.
The couple moved to Port Townsend from Portland without jobs: “A leap of faith,” Kay called it.
Today, she is a working artist and art teacher. He applies his artistic skills as the coordinator of marketing and development at the Port Townsend Marine Science Center.
Weir’s preferred medium is encaustic painting, in which pigments and selected elements are blended with hot wax. She took up the method after graduating, but her work as an art student at Pacific foreshadowed her technique today, in that it incorporated texts, found objects, paint and other things into a unified whole. She displays her work in galleries and online at .
She also teaches elementary school art, as well as courses for adults. She contributes visual art experiences to young people in The Benji Project, a nonprofit that teaches mindful self-compassion to teens. She also teaches art and art history through the Clemente Course, a nonprofit program that provides free college classes to underprivileged adults.
“In some alternate universe if I didn’t need to work to earn an income, I would still be teaching,” she said. “The experience of engaging in imaginative work with children and adults, that exchange of creative thought … is a great joy. It is something I need to do. It’s a calling.”
Kay, who handles the marketing efforts at the marine science center, also shows his photographs at .