Hopkins nurses open art gallery in Fells

Baltimore certainly isn't Paris or New York when it comes to independent art. The galleries are not nearly as numerous or high-profile, and the number of art patrons and buyers is tiny. So when Anthony and Melinda Walker, two Hopkins nurses and would-be art connossieurs, announced the opening of their new project, Gallery ID8, it was and intriguing opportunity: a new marketplace for art and potentially a refreshing view of how a gallery should be run.

Last Friday night around 7 p.m, we arrive at the whitewashed brick row house on 2007 Fleet St. in Fells Point that has become the new gallery space. We see one of the owners,

Anthony Walker, wearing a full tuxedo at the door and suddenly feel self-conscious in jeans, but the bright green door is open and the gallery already flooded with people and friendly light. He welcomes us warmly and ushers us inside, where his wife is at a glass counter wrapping three tiny ceramic heads in silver tissue paper for a new patron. Visitors sip wine and chat in the narrow space between warm yellow walls.

Anthony and Melinda Walker are both nurses and both employed by the Johns Hopkins Medical Institute, but their medical career has long lived symbiotically with their love for art. Gallery ID8 is their new brain child, and it is as independent as independent comes -- neither is studio trained, and neither are many of their featured artists (one collection of oil paint still life is the work of a career construction worker). Anthony himself used to work in surgery, where discarded diamond-tipped drill bits were temptation enough to inspire a self-taught hobby in marble sculpture. Melinda works in the hospital psychiatric ward and is an art agent to Anthony and his artist friends on the side.

The first floor is an eclectic display of Anthony's own sculpture, along with assorted blown glass, jewelry, scarves, oil paintings, watercolor and black and white photography. Upstairs, the gallery's opening exhibit "Body Electric" (March 5 -- April 11) features watercolor by J. Roy Hopkins and vibrant ceramic sculpture by Tom Pergola II.

Although the local artists are amateurs, the prices are not. Anthony Walker's foot-tall signature piece in limestone marble, "Boneless Diver," is $900, and his 12-in. sculpture of a peapod is $350. The pod, engraved on its base with the word "Inedible," he says, represents a new stage of sculpture for him, one that explores the intricacies of nature's simplicity. "Boneless Diver" is bizarrely intriguing: a heavy man in goggles diving down but arching up as if to press his face and palms against the wall of an aquarium. In pure, white marble, it was alluring in a simplistic, almost Neolithic way. I want it.

Upstairs in the "Body Electric" exhibit, other patrons struggle to decide which piece to take home. The exhibit is powerful, lustful, almost crude -- a collection by Hopkins of two-by-three-foot nude male watercolors painted from all angles. Men from behind, flexing their arms behind their head; men gazing intently face forward; men on chairs, legs sprawled, head back, lips parted; men prone but pressing their torso up off the bed.

The watercolors are natural and organic, and the sketch-studies of musculature are beautiful, but as one visitor says when I ask what he thinks, "I'd buy something right now, but something is telling me that it's too...." He trails off, then fills in: "erotic."

Back downstairs before we leave, I scan the walls of black and white photography and oil paintings. It's local Baltimore stuff, one large photograph called "Dad (At Work)" features a cop drawing a gun on a city street sparkling with night time rain. The still lifes are the work of a khaki-clad construction worker, who stands before his work, but most are dull and unendearing.

What really catches the eye is some clever craft work that has turned some old Cuban cigar boxes into bead-dangling clutch purses. Over where Melinda is standing, the glass counter shelters several iridescent glass necklace pendants on silver chains. There are also several brilliantly colored blown-glass platters that sparkle in the window.

As we step out into the night, Anthony makes his way over and shakes our hands goodbye. "Good to get to know you," he says warmly. He and his wife can't stop smiling, and I can tell that the gallery is a lifelong dream-come-true. "Do come back," he says. "We're bringing in more artists all the time. We try not to turn anyone down."

In the hopes of creating a space "where people will feel welcomed, not intimidated," Gallery ID8 steps up with a haven for local artists and art enthusiasts. Their boutique is certainly worth a visit.