“Some of my neighbors didn’t like it,” Alan Newberg said during a drive on Jan. 27 from his home in Brownsville to Newberry Hill, near Silverdale.
Newberg is fairly well known in Kitsap as a former art teacher at Olympic College and a founding member of Bremerton’s Creative Visions Gallery, where he’s still active and currently showing a recent sculpture. But Peggy Ottmar had never met him.
Peggy Ottmar did, however, enjoy the object Newberg said bothered some neighbors along Illahee Road way back in the early 1990s. Drawing someone’s ire (Newberg said he never learned who) was a large fiberglass whale fluke, painted black and attached to a floating buoy that Newberg crafted at that time. It was possibly his first artistic piece after moving to Kitsap in 1989, when his wife Ellen was hired at Kitsap Regional Library. She arrived in town from Billings, Montana, before her husband, and lived temporarily at a friend’s home along Hood Canal. A gray whale spent five days off the shore, he said, but left the day after Alan arrived in town, a foggy day when he could only hear the creature spout. Nonetheless, the artist was inspired…