Lately, goldsmith Douglas Zaruba has been spending his retirement from jewelry-making dreaming up his next artistic venture: painting and sculpture.

Zaruba said he thinks of it as going back to the basics. He handed off his Frederick, Md.-based jewelry gallery Zaruba & Zaruba to his son, Andrew Zaruba in 2004. Now Douglas Zaruba is revisiting the media he said he quit "cold turkey" after he chose to become a goldsmith in the 1970s.

One of his pieces, "Dreamgate," is on view this week at the Washington County Arts Council's juried community show, "The Eye and The Touch." The show concludes Saturday, Jan. 2.

Zaruba said the piece is an outgrowth of his current artistic mood of visually exploring gravity, balance and tension. He said he comes up with his ideas in his dreams.

"A lot of my work involves things you can't see, but they're there," Zaruba said.

We caught up with the 60-year-old retiree in his chilly downtown studio in Hagerstown, where he discussed his artistic philosophies and pined for his permanent home at Cayo de Agua island in Panama.

He also talked about why he choose cold Hagerstown for his studio over Panama, home to tropical temperatures.

He said studio space in Hagerstown costs less than it does in Frederick, Md. - a community Zaruba thinks has gone "too commercial" - and it's more convenient than having to ship goods from Panama. He said if he has a show in the United States, he can end up paying $5,000 per item in shipping fees. Additionally, some art supplies, such as golden paint and certain fabrics, are only available in the United States.

He said he had the Hagerstown space since the late summer.

"This is the first time I've come back," Zaruba said.

Born and raised in Buffalo, N.Y., Zaruba said his parents weren't visual artists. But by the time he was in high school, it was clear that he wanted to take his habit of sketching and drawing everything seriously.

Zaruba earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1976, the same year he began his five-year apprenticeship with German master goldsmith, Heinz-Josef Steiniger. Zaruba said Steiniger helped him design the concepts exactly as they existed in his mind.

"When I was just learning this, I would sketch it," Zaruba said. "When I got good, I would learn to think it. Then I would dream it."

The advantage of dreaming over sketching?

"You're only sketching in 2-D and jewelry is in 3-D plus time," Zaruba said.

By "time," Zaruba said he means the way a piece might look different in the day versus the night, or how an item moves on the person.

While he's not doing much by way of jewelry anymore, he's still drawing from the same sets of influences that helped him create jewelry. He still remembers what his former mentor said once he deemed Zaruba "ready" to create designs: "Now your hands can make what your mind's thinking of."

Zaruba's artistic process could be described as trippy. He would like to think that his pieces open a talismanic doorway to a collective unconsciousness for the people seeing it. In an ideal world, there would be no intended "meaning" or "definition" attached to his work.

"What we see in a piece changes over time," Zaruba said. "If you can see something and immediately identify it, you've failed."