There’s a good chance you’ve seen some of Derek Gore’s work without realizing it.

Having spent more than a decade in the corporate art world after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design, the Melbourne-based artist has produced designs for clients like Lucasfilm, U2, Sublime, the NFL, ESPN, Major League Baseball, and Reebok, to name a scant few. Gores was also one of fifteen artists selected for the 2009 Manifest Hope exhibition prior to the presidential inauguration in Washington, D.C., and has since earned commissions from Pfizer and SEIU’s health care reform campaign. He’s currently at work on five of his signature collage pieces for the new Orlando Magic arena due to open in September, and several of his originals feature prominently in the “New Contemporary Movement” exhibition being showcased at the London Miles Gallery.

But while Gores is principally known for his impressive professional credentials, the sheer variety of his work — the art nouveau romanticism of several Schiele and Klimt-inspired line drawings, a series of muted abstracts, and scores of mixed media collages — renders easy labels like mere “graphic artist” wholly insufficient. If there’s one binding theme running through Gores’ vast portfolio, it’s the blurring of several borders separating commercial graphics from fine art, an ethos that also informs the work of another of his influences, Toulouse-Lautrec.

I ask him if he finds an inherent difference between the two disciplines. “Graphic design can be art surely; maybe it’s a scale thing. There’s plenty of graphic design that is moving, just as there is plenty of traditional art that is not. Way, way back, someone like Toulouse-Lautrec would have been considered a graphic designer with his burlesque posters, and yet those are indeed art.”

Gores admits to having waged “a healthy inner and outer battle” between commercial art and dreamy abstract painting while pursuing an illustration major at RISD. “Each helped the other in my case,” he says. “I came into RISD very precise and controlled, and was introduced to faster and wilder alternatives, like drawing with both hands at once or using lots of gushing water to make everything just beyond my control.”

Many of Gores’ abstracts and distinctive collages incorporate angular elements of fashion and machinery design. “I enjoy the contrast between living beauty and man-made beauty, such as buildings, engines, typography, hard-edged creations. In my collage art, I hand-rip recycled magazines, maps, and schematics to build the figures. Fashion design utilizes a similar idea, where very angular and sharp compositional shapes are used to accentuate the feminine qualities of the figure. By using fashion magazines in much of my collage artwork, I’ve been able to combine several of my influences and interests into one piece of art. Lately I’ve made a series of collaged high-heeled shoes.”

Gores, who is originally from New York, also cites the backdrop of his New England youth as a strong influence. “My young years were spent in Massachusetts, with little vacations to Cape Cod,” he tells me. “The whole ‘roots of the nation’ thing in New England is a tangible and a big part of my inspiration… as well as big stuff like how the man-made structures harmonize with the woods, ocean, sea grass and the slate-rock walkways.” After moving with his family to Florida, Gores came to embrace a different kind of simplicity and minimalism.

“I like the conditions here,” Gores says, before describing the Brevard arts scene as “nicely percolating.” “We have unique conditions, such as the smarts fostered around the Space Program, which sparked all sorts of innovative companies. We have a great educational system, including an internationally respected tech school. Complement that with beach culture, bike culture, bold youth, a hungry art museum, and here we go,” he says. “I love that we have people willing to make their town more cool. I don’t hear ‘Melboring’ like you used to, like a victim. Artists are out there concocting shows, music festivals, and partnering with developers. The fashion boutiques are creating spectacles. I think more artists are standing on each other’s shoulders and shouting louder. We’re getting past just hanging our little rectangle paintings on someone’s wall and hoping it will sell. More and more artists are curating — curating a space, a room, a show, their town. These are the qualities you want from a strong art scene.”

As an extension of those beliefs, Gores is known for promoting other local artists. “I try to be aware of all our artistic resources… just because I love art and I want to see all of it. And then once it is in my head, I do pass on leads to people, such as the Sports and the Arts organization who commissioned me to do several pieces for the new Orlando Magic Arena. I asked to hear their big picture, and then suggested about ten Brevard artists they ought to get involved to fill the particular needs. Locally, I love seeing the work of Jeff Filipski, SONE, certainly Chris Maslow who is just on fire, also Marg Kuhl, David Burton, Larry Buist. Casey Decotis’ photos. Always Cliff Chandler’s big plans. Ryan Speer of Speerbot made my website, and he is able to take graphic design to that higher level. ”

Arts education within the local community is another issue Gores is passionate about. “We have to make sure not to butcher our arts programs in the public school system. Here’s why: Firstly, Arts education isn’t just for future artists. It is the most pure version of fostering creative problem-solving skills for young minds. Achievers in any field need those problem-solving skills, whether kids eventually become doctors, lawyers, chefs, engineers or policemen and women. Secondly, a big chunk of the population respond more to arts-based education than they do to the linear logic in old-school math, for example. So, voters and parents and the school board need to recognize that art isn’t ‘pretty pictures’ and a ‘nice to have’ in between the hard stuff. Art is essential in education.”

I ask Gores about his first exposure to art and how, if at all, his views have changed since he first began sketching invented “Star Wars” characters. “I think everything I’ve done has always been about people,” he responds. “The living, moving, pulsing energy of the human being. At age 7, it was those made-up fantasy characters and their worlds. Later, it fit under the name ‘figure study,’ but that somehow limited it to just the physical body. Now I hope I go after the beauty of what it is like to be alive, with all the intuitions and the peripheral vision and distractions and intense passions and butterflies in the stomach that go with really living.”

View some of Derek Gores’ work online at www.derekgores.com. He can be reached at 258-2119. Here in Florida, Gores will have a solo exhibition at Tampa’s Baisden Gallery on September 11. In October, Gores’ work will be at SLOW Gallery and Downtown Divas Boutique in Melbourne. Gores was recently chosen to design the poster for fall’s Space Coast Art Festival.

Bruce Williamson
• Tobin Bennison •

Give enough time, everything comes back around again.

It’s one of the more vague maxims out there, but it holds particular relevance for Bruce Williamson, a Cocoa Beach-based surf artist whose incredible 40-year career has recently come full circle.

Known during the ’70s — as now — for the dreamlike qualities of his colorful airbrushed designs, Williamson got his start custom painting cars with fantastical tableaux and accents, so it’s rather fitting that he first came to these shores from Arlington, VA, riding in one of his early masterpieces. Even without the benefit of photographic evidence, his description of the van’s intricately laced, cobwebbed panels is enough to burn its image onto my brain. And the idyllic backdrop of that first summer road trip he made back in 1971 brands the image even deeper.

“It was me and a buddy of mine, Mike, and his dog. We had no real destination — we were 18, just taking a road trip — and we ended up in Cocoa Beach,” Williamson recalls. “We parked up at Gadsden Lane… There was nothing but trees there at the time. We were hanging out on the beach and some surfers who’d been admiring the van just came up and started talking to us. I didn’t surf then — my buddy did — and we just got to talking with these guys.” A few days later, now staying with some of the friendly surfers in their Merritt Island home, Williamson woke his friend and made a decision. “It was just a beautiful morning and I said to Mike, ‘I gotta go back to Virginia,’ and he says ‘What for?’ ‘I gotta get my stuff, man,’ I told him.” Three months later, Williamson was back in Cocoa Beach, and he’s been here ever since.

He found work in a paint and body shop and enrolled in Brevard Junior College, but his new-found love of surfing was pulling him in another direction. “One day I was looking through Surfer Magazine and I saw this little picture of an airbrushed seagull flying in front of the sun. And I thought, ‘Well, I can do that.’” Crafting a stenciled design inspired by that seagull image and airbrushing it onto some shirts, Williamson now had a way of making his dream reality. “There were some other people around here doing airbrushing, so I thought I’d just start making more designs. Slowly but surely, I built up a repertoire of different designs, and people really liked them,” he says. “The whole reason for doing it was that I wanted to drop out of school and surf. The t-shirts gave me the means to do it.”

His trunk filled with t-shirts and airbrushed surf paintings, Williamson drove up and down the east coast selling his popular, sea shell tank tops and shirts to surfer girls and retail shops by the dozens. “I was selling them as fast as I could make them,” he tells me, “but more than anything, I just loved making them. Friends would come over to my house and hang out while I airbrushed. I could do two dozen in an evening, and get up the next morning and surf all day. It was blast.” Williamson also branched out into airbrushing surfboards, and worked in board factories all through the County.

By this time, Williamson had earned an enviable reputation as one of the hottest surf artists around. Noted for the clean, sharp lines of their bordered tropical vistas and dyed, front-to-back patterns, his t-shirts became a must-have fashion item. Wave shirts were particularly popular for their dreamlike contours and otherworldly colors. “I just wanted the waves to be dreamy, you know?” Williamson laughs. “I wasn’t as concerned as other artists were with them being super-realistic. I just wanted people to look at them and smile. I wanted them to give people a good feeling.” Sedate blue and green designs enjoyed popularity in the Carolinas, while Floridians clamored for wilder, more colorful versions, and Williamson’s success continued apace.

But by 1984, cheaper, more slapdash designs conspired to push him out of the market, and one day he decided he’d had it with airbrushing. “I said, ‘To hell with it,’ and I put everything into a box and put the box away,” he says, recounting the event. But Williamson soon found another lucrative outlet when he and local artist Mike Gray began carving fiberglass dolphins out of surfboard blanks. “Mike carved the first one, but he just didn’t like dealing with the fiberglass,” Williamson remembers. “He saw that mine were good, that I’d had a technique down, and he just told me to run with it.”

Sea World, one of Williamson’s earliest and steadiest clients, became interested after seeing some prototypes and sketches he brought to a surf expo, quite by chance. “A friend had a booth set up there,” says Williamson, “and his product got held up in customs, so he asked me if I’d like the space. People were lined up to make orders for dolphins, including a guy from Sea World who pulled me aside with a request for a number of them.” Known as Xeno Art dolphins, Williamson’s sleek, expertly glassed sculptures became an even bigger hit than his shirts, with larger three-dimensional pieces finding their way into homes, businesses, restaurants, retail stores, and marine theme parks throughout Florida and the Bahamas. Two of the more well-known examples still greet visitors to the Cocoa Beach Country Club.

As time went on, Williamson found it harder to keep up with increased demand, and some life changes, coupled with his growing displeasure for fiberglass, saw him retire Xeno Art dolphins in 2004. A three-year stint with Disney Cruise Lines took its physical toll on Williamson, and he found himself at loose ends. But he had a plan. “After cashing out with Disney I went home, and my son said, ‘Dad, what are you going to do now?’ And I said, ‘Son, I want show you something.’” Taking out his box of old stencils and designs, Williamson and his son carefully peeled the protective wax paper off the cardboard forms with the aid of a hair dryer. “They’d been stuck together and compounded on top of each other for 30 years,” he chuckles.

Last November, Williamson opened She Shells as a showcase for his revived line of classic ’70s airbrushed t-shirts and tank tops, as well some new animal-print beach blouses and wraparounds. The studio/boutique, located in downtown Cocoa Beach, also features handmade wormwood frames, small, mountable plywood surfboards (airbrushed and finished to his exacting standards), and framed reproductions of some vintage Bruce Williamson art. Their retro feel of these designs has proved popular once again, and Williamson, in his own words, is “lovin’ life.” “I love seeing on of my shirts on a good-lookin’ girl,” he says. “I feel like I’m making a contribution.” What’s more, people still call him in search of his Xeno Art dolphins, and he’s ready to get back into churning them out.

After our meeting, I’m drawn back once again to the van that brought Williamson here 39 years ago. It’s rare to find an artist with that kind of talent for description, one that relies less on actual words than soulful evocation. This skill bleeds over into his work, I find, and as unreal and unchartable as some of his designs seem, they’re also couched in solid experience and the rich feelings it engenders. It’s what made them popular in the ’70s and what gives them the charm they enjoy today. As far as many fans are concerned, Williamson’s art never really fell out of fashion, and likely never will.

Bruce Williamson’s She Shells is located at 116 N. Orlando Ave. in downtown Cocoa Beach. She Shells is open Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Call 368-8828 for more information, or visit www.brucewilliamsonsurfart.com.

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The Space Coast Art of Sand Festival

Throughout the month of April, the Radisson Resort at the Port will host the Space Coast Art of Sand Festival, a showcase of family-friendly activities, entertainment, and competitions centered around breathtaking creations by some of the most renowned sand sculptors in the world.

Many of these masterpieces, some reaching over 15 feet high, will be completed by April 2 for public viewing, but a series of planned events and contests will transform the area into a sculpture park formed from over 700 tons of white sand by month’s end. During the three-day opening weekend Festival, April 2-4, visitors can enjoy a wide range of food and beverages, vendors, and entertainment options all while taking in some 15 sculptures by a core roster of chosen exhibition sculptors.

Conceived by the Brevard Cultural Alliance, a non-profit collection of community arts organizations whose mission is to foster a dynamic cultural sector within the county, and organized with the help of sand sculptors Jill Harris and Thomas Koet of Sandsational Sand Sculpting, the Festival brings together award-winning sculptors from around the world — several from Florida — working with various artistic themes.

Exhibition sculptors include Katsuhiko Chaen of Japan; multimedia sculptor Karen Fralich; Kentuckian Damon Farmer; Ilya Filimontsev of Russia; Dutch artist Marjon Katerberg; Canadian Michel Lepire; Leonardo Ugolini of Jesolo, Italy; and both Harris and Koet.

Together, Harris and Koet founded Sandsational as a way to promote their love of this stunning art form. As a team, they’ve traveled all over the globe and have earned numerous prizes for their mind-bending creations. We asked Satellite Beach native Harris how she first got into the discipline.

“A friend of mine is a part-time sand sculptor. For years I saw photos of his work,” she explains. “I got a chance to tag along on a project once, and he asked if I wanted to give it a try. I did, and I was hooked. He and his wife encouraged me to enter contests and to get involved in other events. A year later I quit my job and started Sandsational. That was about 14 years ago.”

An art form practiced by Egyptians as early as 4000 B.C., sand sculpture has changed little since, and is, put simply, the construction of a variety of forms comprised entirely of sand and water. Viewers will notice sculptors occasionally spraying a mixture of water and glue to create a thin, protective crust on their sculptures. Though the sand used for the Festival is a special formulation shipped from a Winter Haven quarry, no additives are introduced to prevent their creations toppling.

Harris described the sculpture process for us. “First you make a hard block of sand out of loose sand by compressing layer upon layer of the moistened sculpture sand in a rough shape, or a mold. We keep filling the different-sized molds until we’ve reached the right height and then start cutting shapes in the hard block of sand. This is always done from the top down.”

“Special tools are used to cut the sand. For the detailed work, palette knives are used. Larger tools such as cement trowels are used for the coarser work. From a cranes and shovels to straws and paintbrushes… they all can be used as tools. Tips are exchanged by builders, and tools are a common subject of discussion. Every builder has his or her own favorite tools depending on their chosen specialty and field of sculpture.”

Wires are placed in the uppermost part of many sculptures to prevent interference from birds, but nothing guarantees complete protection from outside forces. Most rain will not do serious damage to sculptures, though torrential downpours can cause total collapse of several-tiered pieces. Regardless of weather conditions, dedicated sculptors press on — often against the clock in competitions — to make their vision a reality for all to enjoy.

Before the process is even begun, says Harris, “a sculptor must be able to imagine what the sculpture will look like and what dimensions the design should have. With much practice, one gains experience. One carver may like an architectural tour de force, while another prefers figures. The same skills are necessary for both disciplines. They involve carving steadily and straight and an eye for anatomical proportions. It is not necessary to have attended art school to make sand sculptures. But the master sculptors are regarded as true artists in their chosen medium.”

Harris tells us that there are perhaps one hundred professional, full-time sand sculptors in the world. Out of this group, BCA and organizers like Harris chose sculptors with a variety of styles, each renowned for creating beautiful, crowd-pleasing works. “We also wanted to have sculptors from different countries come to the Space Coast,” Harris says. “We hope when they go home they will be like ambassadors, telling other people what a nice place it is here.”

As the month continues, other sculptures will take shape thanks to amateurs, students, and youth and corporate teams. Saturday, April 10 sees the Festival’s Corporate Challenge, and Friday the 16th through Sunday the 18th will present the Space Coast Open Master & Professional Sculptors Challenge. A Student Challenge takes place on Saturday the 24th, and the Festival winds down April 30 and May 1 with Family Days & Nights. Throughout the event there will be a hands-on Youth Pavilion, where kids can experiment with their own sand sculptures and learn about the environment as well as many other activities for the entire family.

The Space Coast Art of Sand Festival runs April 2 through May 1 at the Radisson at the Port, 8701 Cape Canaveral, where 528 and A1A meet. Event hours are Monday through Thursday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Friday 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Saturday 9 a.m. to 10 p.m., and Sunday from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Admission is $8 for adults and $4 for children under 12, seniors and military personnel. Visit www.artofsandus.com to find out more details and check out Jill Harris and Thomas Koet’s Sandsational Sand Sculpting at www.sandsational.com.

Born and raised on the beaches of Ft. Lauderdale, Monique moved to Melbourne five years ago, and now, at the young age of 26, she’s already spent more time on the water than many salts twice her age. A seasoned traveler and lifelong water worshipper, Monique prefers plunging headfirst into the ocean where others seem content to dip their toes into a mere fraction of its vastness.

Armed with an innate love of art and an enviable skill with a wide range of watersports — surfing, wakeboarding, wakeskating, freediving, and spearfishing — Monique has traveled extensively to feed an insatiable passion for her chosen muse. She’s traveled as a professional wakeboarder for competitions all over the world, to places like Australia, New Zealand, Japan, the Philippines, Europe, the Caribbean, and South and Central America, and recently worked as a first mate aboard a sport fishing boat that through the British Virgin Islands, the Dominican Republic, the Bahamas, and Cuba.

Wherever Monique goes, she’s always in search of new inspirations. “It is important for me to go deeply into life and not be content to skim merrily along on its surface,” she explains. “Traveling has expanded my horizons beyond the material aspects of life, such as clothing, fancy cars, and money. I love getting lost in different parts of the world.”

These voyages have also informed every facet of her artwork. Whether acrylic or oil paintings, welded steel sculptures, or delicate blown glass pieces, Monique’s all of creations bear the unmistakable impress of the sea. Time spent in the British Virgin Islands inspired her with its sublime scenery and brilliantly-hued tropical reefs. “The unbelievable sunsets and sunrises over looking the peaks of each island was breathtaking,” she recalls.

But one of her favorite trips was to Naga, an island in the Philippines where she competed in the women’s wakeboarding world championship and placed 7th out of 68 in the world. “I went on a tour to swim with whale sharks on a canoe-type boat with bamboo outriggers and an old crusty engine, one day,” Monique tells me. “The local guy steering the boat looked down in the water and yelled in his language to jump in. As I went underwater I saw an 80-foot whale shark gracefully swimming along the surface. I swam with it for about fifteen minutes and it was one of the greatest experiences of my life.”

As a child, Monique was always interested crafts and started making her first pieces at the age of three. “My mom was always creative and buying my sister and I paints and other crafts to make at a very young age.” Taking her first art class in took my first art class in 11th grade, Monique learned the learned the basics of art and went on to attend WheatonArts in Millville, New Jersey where she first learned how to blow glass and took her certifications for welding. Using these skills, she’s made trophies for Bahamian and South Florida fishing tournaments and has completed large sculptures both in steel and in glass, which can be found in many public parks throughout the southern part of the state. The glass pieces she fashions today are generally freeform sea creatures, ones inspired by the stillness of the reefs she loves so much. Freediving and spearfishing lure her down in search of that stillness, but the pieces born out of those moments speak volumes about Monique’s artistic vision.

As for her paintings, Monique credits the variety of classes she took while at Wheaton. “I got the chance to apprentice under many amazing artists from around the country and learned a new technique on each painting I did. For me its all about layers of paint.” Amazingly, Monique doesn’t paint her subjects from photographs. Working from a dream/travel journal she adds to each day, she takes those sketches and transfers them to canvas. “It’s all out of my mind and the way I want to see them,” she admits.

She counts the elastic perception of Salvador Dali and M.C. Escher as strong influences, but she’s just as fond of famed aquatic artist Wyland. Whatever the reference point, each of Monique’s pieces is different and the time it takes to complete them varies greatly. “I’ve done a mural on a three-story building in four days from start to finish, but some canvas pieces take me a couple of weeks to complete.” Her personal favorite? “I did this painting with an underwater shot of a surfer getting barreled with his hand trailing in the wave. The colors were different shades of blues with the surfer’s shadow running through them.” Monique has just made a shirt emblazoned with this image for Indialantic’s famed Spectrum Surf Shop, which she owns with her fiancé, Benjamin. Apart from being one of a major influence on the east coast surf scene for over 30 years, Spectrum also serves as studio for Monique’s work.

Currently, Monique is in the process of designing her own line of screen-printed bikinis bearing her pieces, called Richter Bikinis, and is also developing her own clothing line. As far as the future goes, she hopes to organize more solo shows of her work while expanding both the gallery and surf shop. Now that she’s back home after a spate of recent overseas travel, Monique has also set to work on a new series of paintings. “I feel that my feet are planted on the ground and now I can be productive,” she says. “I live my life day by day with no regrets. If I ever fall down, I’ll get up and try again.”

You can see Monique Richter’s paintings at Spectrum Surf Shop, located at 130 Fifth Avenue in Indialantic. Call them at (321) 768-7873, or visit them online at www.spectrumsurfshop.com. Monique also has work on display at Pure Art in the Cayman Islands. She welcomes commissioned pieces — everything from indoor/outdoor murals and landscapes to portraits on canvas.

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At least that’s how the self-taught Merritt Island artist sees it. “I truly believe that whatever talent I have comes from God,” he tells me. “In many ways, He’s been pushing me to paint throughout my whole life. I think that 90% of it is Him and the other 10% of it is just me getting up in the morning to pick up my brushes.”

Sibert says this with a curious mixture of steely confidence and disarming humility, a trait he might share with his creative idol, Michelangelo. And though he’s quick to invoke both the Italian master and the Supreme Being as prime artistic inspirations, Sibert is no wide-eyed holy roller. Because as willing as he is to attribute his success to divine intervention, he’s also just as indebted to some very earthly instigators for his relatively late and very impressive appearance on the local art scene.

Born in Virginia and raised in California until the age of 16, Sibert moved to Brevard in 1988. By the time of his relocation, he’d already dabbled in sketching, recalling that one of his first pictures had potential as soon as he’d finished it. “But the more I refined it and worked on it,” he adds, “the better it looked. I worked on it some more and it looked really, really good. After that, my pictures just started to get better the more I worked on them. I knew I had something right from the beginning.”

With very little formal training, apart from some rudimentary high school art classes he did passably well in, Sibert abandoned art for more reliable work — and steadier paychecks. “Around the ages of 18 and 19, I stopped caring as much about art. I never thought I’d be able to make anything out of it. I didn’t see much of a future in it at the time.” As a result, he says he still has a modest collection of “name tags and hairnets” to prove that other more traditional occupational options didn’t offer much else in the way of financial stability.

After working on and off for his extended family’s construction business, Sibert, at the behest of his wife Lisa (an accomplished artist in her own right), took up his pens, pencils, and brushes just four years ago for another stab at his heart’s passion. “Before that, I’d sketched from time to time and would often see striking images in my dreams. Whenever I put pen to paper I was amazed that I hadn’t lost it. I was in the middle of doing a picture of Superman and I remember thinking that if anyone can make any money out of doing art, I’m going to find a way to do it.”

Sibert’s first formal personal challenge was a painstaking acrylic amalgam of some 23 different frogs, culled from various photos cut from magazines. “I really just wanted to see what I could do if I got serious about painting,” he remembers. “The first frog came out impressively, but both my wife and I thought that it may have been some kind of fluke. ‘Keep going,’ Lisa told me. ‘If the rest of the frogs look that good, then you’ve definitely got it.’” Seeking still more confirmation, Sibert approached two artists in booths at the Space Coast Art Festival in Cocoa Beach back in 2005 for their advice.

“I figured I needed to get some guidance from someone in the business; someone who’d made it work for them,” Sibert recounts. “I went up to one of the best I’d seen that day and asked him if it was really his full-time job. He told me he’d put four kids through college with his paintings and encouraged me based on the work I showed him.” The second artist wasn’t quite as encouraging, but still offered Sibert a grain of hope. “He gave me some really solid, sound advice, but told me not to quit my day job.” But after adding that he’d only made about $125,000 during the prior year, Sibert didn’t need much more convincing. He’d heard enough to make the leap into art full time. “‘Sign me up,’ I remember thinking.”

Since his re-induction into the art world, Sibert seems to be making up for lost time. Within four short years, he’s amassed a huge portfolio of canvases, murals, sign work, drawing, sketches, and interior design pieces.

And while their number is impressive, considering the short time it’s taken him to produce them, even more startling is the diversity of their visionary subject matter. Comic book-inspired imagery holds some sway, but each is matched by an even larger number of inventive abstracts, impressionistic studies, still lifes, portraits, and works of uncanny photorealism.

Still though, Sibert is always ready to deflate any perceived pretensions in his work. “I don’t consider myself so much of an artist as much as a human Xerox machine,” he says. “Real art is in the beauty God has already created. I just try to mirror it.”

When he’s not busy building up his portfolio and increasing his output at an alarming rate, Sibert is busy setting higher and more demanding goals for himself. “If I haven’t painted it yet,” he avows, “I will.”

You can see some of Jessie Sibert’s art online at: www.sibertart.com. He’s also available for commissioned work, including murals and signs. Contact him by calling (321) 987-6107 or by emailing jessiesibert@yahoo.com.

Surf artist Phil Goodrich, an Indialantic native now based in Fork, SC, began drawing in high school to express his frustration with the status quo.

During the late ’80s, Melbourne High was focused almost completely on its football program, Goodrich remembers. “We tried to start a surf club and the school wouldn’t help us out at all,” he says. “Instead of fighting them, I made little cartoons and caricatures of the people who were working against us.”

Starting by sketching the reflection of his own eyes in the mirror, Goodrich practiced his craft daily, still finding time to compete in the first of many surf contests in 1985. To this date, he counts his best result as a 4th place in the 1988 East Coast Championship, one year before setting off for college.

Enrolling in San Diego’s Point Loma University, chosen in part for the ocean view from the freshmen dorms, Goodrich began pursuing a Graphic Communications major, but soon switched to straight Studio Art after developing an aversion to staring at computer screens. It was during this time that he first began using pastels and watercolors, developing his style into a more realistic one inspired by Klimt, Lipking, Degas, and Manet.

Goodrich started using wood as a painting surface during his senior year at Point Loma. “I had to put on my senior art show,” he recalls, “and I basically had nothing to show that I liked.” Peeking into the back closet of the art department, he found a stack of plywood and a box of discarded pastels. “I just had a creative flurry and I stuck with that method for years to follow.”

After graduation, Goodrich created a series of cartoonish watercolors for Transworld Snowboard and Surfer magazines before co-founding San Diego’s Soul Grind skate shop with a friend. “He owned the product,” Goodrich says, “and I designed the logos, t-shirts, and skate graphics. Whenever I earned a little extra money, I’d take off on a surf trip.”

Along with surfing, travel has provided some of the strongest inspirations for his work, and Goodrich still counts exotic locals from around the globe as his preferred subjects — people from Mexico; Barbados; Costa Rica; Panama; Ecuador; Nicaragua; Peru; Haiti, and his favourite destination, Indonesia, where he’s logged some 22 months travel experience over the past 9 years. “No matter how many times I go back, I still find it inspiring,” he tells me.

Of his ethnic portraits, Goodrich says: “I like to capture a moment. I begin with a photo or group of photos. I stare at a blank piece of wood, flipping it around until I start to see some of the shapes from the photo within the wood grain.” Making a quick sketch in charcoal, he then fills in some of the color values with pastels, employed as much for their compactness as for their low cost. The final stage sees Goodrich painting over the whole image with oils, a relatively new medium for him.

“Whenever I’d have an art show, people responded well, but the general comment kept surfacing — ‘I really like your work, but what would it look like in oils?’” Since doing a series of his first in 2005, Goodrich has been using oil on wood regularly. He’s also expanded his repertoire to include likenesses of obscure Blues musicians. “I like to paint the ones people may have forgotten about. I associate myself with a lot of them because they weren’t concerned with fame or fortune — they just loved the music.”

Goodrich finds himself feeling the same way about his two main passions: art and surfing. “I have a high level of skill when it comes to tube riding, but put me in a contest jersey and I’m hopeless. It’s the same with my art; people seem to enjoy my work, but when it comes to the business of promoting and selling it, I’m similarly at a loss.”

But is Phil Goodrich unhappy with his current, often penniless, lot? Not at all. “I really enjoy the way things are. I always feel that success and recognition are right around the corner.”

View Phil Goodrich’s work at several sites online: http://philgoodrich.imagekind.com; www.freewebs.com/philgoodrich; www.absoluteart.com/portfolios/p/philgoodrich; Contact him through any of them to purchase pieces or to commission new paintings.

One of music’s most extraordinary qualities is the way it can conjure images through seemingly unrelated sensory organs. That it inspired Goldacker to invest in a quiver of pens and pencils and a drawing pad, rather than the expected source instruments, is even more extraordinary.

At first reckoning, events in Goldacker’s New Jersey early childhood might have seen him adopting a wholly different artistic path. He remembers his father drawing cartoons for him as a kid, ones peopled with characters like Popeye and Superman, and Goldacker recalls tracing some of these images as early as 4 or 5. “I don’t ever remember art not being a part of my life,” he says. “I used to go straight to the art section of the library whenever I went there. Books on the masters, graphic design manuals, lettering books — anything and everything to do with art was what I went for.”

But by the time he turned 10 around 1970, Goldacker became hooked on music and, by extension, that era’s exemplar of music-inspired poster art, Peter Max. Emulating Max’s clear, meandering lines for renditions of his own favorite musicians, Goldacker began sowing the seeds of a style he now recognizes as “contemporary retro.” Around the same time, the Goldacker family relocated to Florida, and after a brief spell in Miami, Goldacker himself moved to Brevard County, where he opened a café called Java The Hut in Indian Harbour Beach. This venture, and another called Kool Beanz he ran in Cocoa Village until 1998, earned him his “Java” sobriquet. Both cafés were bohemian havens for local art and coffee lovers, and through them, Goldacker and his wife sold handcrafted jewelry and t-shirts he designed along with prints of his pen-and-ink drawings. It was then that he made a name for himself doing graphic design side work for businesses and individuals, all while paying homage to his idol, Max.

An avid concertgoer, Goldacker has, through the years, created a series of portraits of rock musicians based on iconic photographs that are unique for the way in which they came about. Working his way backstage to famous performers (either legitimately or otherwise), he presented his heroes with their likenesses for autographing along with another copy to keep as their own. The practice proved successful, if nerve-wracking, as an ‘87 meeting with Elvin Bishop in Miami illustrates.

Showing Bishop his portrait, Goldacker remembers him scratching his chin doubtfully and passing the image back before uttering: “Welp. I’ll tell you what, son. I’m not quite sure about the likeness. Looks more like Rod Stewart.” Undeterred, Goldacker, with the help of some “liquid courage,” approached Bishop again with his portfolio after the show, and by evening’s end, Bishop had accepted the offer and the two became quick friends. Among the many Goldacker’s done (he’s collected over 100 autographs on original pieces) are likenesses of Ringo Starr, Alice Cooper, George Carlin, Joe Cocker, and Wolfman Jack.

But a recent meeting with Peter Max in Boca Raton eclipses all every one of these backstage run-ins. Ever the music fanatic, Goldacker interviewed Max for his own recently resurrected radio show, now available worldwide on the Tropic Wave Radio Network. Max enjoyed the discussion so much and was so impressed with Goldacker’s ability that he invited he and his wife up to his New York home/studio. There, Max presented Goldacker with a double portrait that features both artists’ respective images of each other. It’s Goldacker’s prized possession and one that echoes the mind-bending themes of much of his work, particularly a 30-foot indoor trompe l’oeil mural of rock royalty at Dalino’s Pizza in Merritt Island. Along with some clever visual tricks, the mural is also packed with allegorical symbols and inside references that continue to stump even the most devoted music fans.

Goldacker’s swirling, intricate designs have garnered him a strong local following, and over the past 12 years he’s designed three official t-shirts and accompanying posters for the South Florida Folk Festival and two for the Cocoa Village Jazz Fest. He’s also designed dozens of band logos and CD covers for groups like Acoustic Alliance and Taylor Made, and he most recently created a striking poster for the classic ’60s psychedelic band The Electric Prunes. The image is currently being sold at their live performances and was featured as a standout in PhotoShop Creative Magazine last year. Other Goldacker works are featured in two mass-market books: “PhanArt: The Art of Phish Phans” and “HOPE: A Collection of Obama Posters and Prints.” Goldacker also illustrated local author Diane Carr’s “River Dragon,” a children’s book based on the crumbling Merritt Island landmark, and he’s just been contracted to illustrate another, “Bud The Spud” by Adam Byrn Tritt, set for national release in 2010.

Local music lovers and radio show junkies may know Goldacker as host of “An Acoustic Record,” which airs Monday nights on WFIT. Now set to host “On The Flipside” on Tropic Wave Radio Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., Goldacker will draw from a three-year archive of interviews he conducted with international recording artists, regional performers, and pop culture icons, including Jewel; Ian McLagan of The Faces; Ray Manzarek; Ian Gillan; Dave Davies; Larry Coryell; Charlie Daniels, and Peter Max himself. “On The Flipside” will also feature themed programs built around the music of artists like Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie.

As with everything Goldacker creates, the thematic thread leads back to the music he loves. It’s a source of unending inspiration for his drawings, paintings, graphic designs, logos, and a stellar radio show. It’s also one that continues to feed both the eyes and the ears.

Visit “Java” John Goldacker online at these sites: www.koolbeanz.com; www.splitbeanz.blogspot.com; www.myspace.com/acousticrecord; www.javajohn.etsy.com. Beginning December 1, tune into “On The Flipside” Monday-Friday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Tropic Wave Radio — www.tropicwaveradio.net.

Along with an abundance of fall celebrations and community food drives, the Space Coast Art Festival has become synonymous with the Thanksgiving season, and many families find themselves organizing their feasts around the annual show. For thousands of locals, convincing out-of-state relatives to spend the holiday beachside is never much of a problem thanks to the Festival, which has become a Thanksgiving tradition in and of itself.

A definitive seasonal milestone since its 1963 inception, November’s 46th Annual Space Coast Art Festival is expected to draw some 30,000 art lovers to downtown Cocoa Beach. The 235 participating artists selected by the discerning board will compete in nine distinct categories — oils and acrylics; watercolors; drawings, graphics, collages and printmaking; clay; sculpture; photography; glass; jewelry; and leather, fiber, paper and wood — for about $50,000 in cash. This November’s Festival also promises to be one of the strongest showings of local artists in recent years, with 36 of them hailing from Brevard County alone.

Cocoa Beach brings no less than eight artists to the Festival; among them: John and Gertrude Pointek, Carolyn Terrell, Brian Horan, David Armacost, Claudia Beckwith, Leon Applebaum and sculptor Jim Lasley.

Lasley’s primitivistic yet ultra-modern metal sculptures are poised to be some of the most thought-provoking creations of the weekend. Avowing that his art has been swept along in the madness of a world in a heightened state of spasmatic convolution, Lasley’s work is spurred by a strong, primal desire to translate conflicting images, sounds and feelings into pieces that are simple and concretely clear. “I work in metal because it has the endurance necessary to release my ‘news’ into the outside space,” he says. “With my immigration into simplicity, I dream of leaving the United States of Amnesia behind and joining the march of the new Neanderthals.”

Lasley’s pieces also serve as abstract counterpoints to the ethereal, delicate beauty of fused glass artist Jamille Haddad, who along with Charles Hazelaar and Jeff King, represents Cape Canaveral with some strong and highly individualistic entries. Back in 1977, Haddad became intrigued by the demanding discipline after reading an article in a stained glass journal. One of the recognized pioneers of the resurgent glass art movement in the U.S., Haddad was also one of the first to display pieces in highly-regarded galleries and exhibits, including New York’s Corning Museum of Glass and the Galerie du Vitrail in Chartres, France. His current passion is designing brilliantly-colored Hawaiian tropical reef fish, subjects that convey deeply spiritual themes and his search for light amid an ever-increasing darkness.

Local art enthusiasts should be no strangers to the work of Indialantic’s Mike “Nemo” Nemnich, 3-D artist David Burton and Sloane Keats, nor to that of Satellite Beach’s John Kopf, seascape painter Fred Cheney or stained glass artist Julie Murphy, who is also adept with all manner of decorative forms, from detailed mosaics to broadly-scoped murals. A Satellite Beach resident for over 20 years, Murphy counts sea life as one of her favorite subjects, and her devotion to diving and snorkeling informs many of her pieces with the diaphanous beauty of the aquatic world.

Cocoa’s Paul Lamontagne joins Merritt Island’s Egle Bredikis, Richard Ficker, Noah Hosburgh, Roy Schallenberg and Jackie Walker for the weekend’s journey of artistic discovery, in addition to Palm Bay’s Jens Bisgaard and Lloyd Cheney and Malabar’s Mike Meyer. Viera favorite Witha LaCuesta was encouraged by her father from an early age to paint and draw. Regular visits to art museums in Europe and the United States built a solid foundation in art history and familiarity with famous artists and their philosophies and techniques. Always fascinated with the transparent quality of watercolors, LaCuesta also embraces oils, concentrating on the play of light that is either shining on the subject or reflecting off it.

The same holds true of naturalistic painter Kay Halpern, who along with Lori Pitten-Jenkins, Mark Mittleman, Marsha Sea and wood artist/photographer Kat Reichard represents the city of Melbourne. Titusville brings James Richmond, and Mims provides attendees with the talents of Jimsong Kim and Carol Kim.

Abstract ceramicist Charles Nalle designs playful, yet functional pieces from a melding of techniques culled from both studio and industrial work experiences. In addition to gallery-quality wall art, Nalle has created teapots, mugs and vases that are as artistically pleasing as they are durable. Like Bob Lehman and popular jewelry artist Peggy Miller, Nalle is a Melbourne Beach resident.

Other artists from as far away as New York, Wisconsin and Iowa help bolster the SCAF’s reputation as one of the finest public art shows in the Southeast, if not the nation.

The Space Coast Art Festival also happens to be the best excuse for leaving the Thanksgiving table early. Turkey still tastes good cold, but the region’s most fabulous selection of art always demands immediate attention.

The 46th Annual Space Coast Art Festival takes place Thursday, November 26 through Sunday, November 29. Check this issue’s SCAF Program insert for more details, or log on to www.spacecoastartfestival.com to learn more about the weekend’s events.

Most of the conflict is tied directly to the country’s vast natural resources. These resources are both a blessing and a curse, making the DR Congo a country of great potential and a frequent victim of exploitation. The minerals found there are used in consumer electronics, including laptops and cell phones. While many benefit from the mineral trade, it is the Congolese people who bear the consequences of a conflict that sustains profitable mining enterprise. A combination of unstable governance, a history of bitterness between local groups, and international interest in DR Congo makes this situation one of the most complicated on the planet. A Venice, CA-based non-profit called Falling Whistles is trying to make order out of chaos, one whistle at a time.

It was during a 2007 trip to the DRC that philanthropist and Falling Whistles founder Sean Carasso learned of the “whistle blowers,” Congolese children abducted and conscripted by rebel factions. Too young to hold guns, these children are given merely a whistle and put on the front lines of battle, their sole duty to frighten the enemy with their blowing before receiving the first round of bullets. Those who attempt to flee are shot in the back as encouragement for the others to march forward courageously. Proceeds from the whistles Falling Whistles sell go toward restoring the lives of war-affected children by developing partnerships with Congolese community leaders who are rehabilitating victims through education, art, sports, medical treatment and nutritional services.

Inspired by Falling Whistles’ efforts, Cocoa Beach brothers Ben (21) and Tony Sasso, Jr. (22) and San Diego resident Seth Williams (21), all students at Flagler College in St. Augustine, undertook a grueling, 2,300-mile bike tour across America to help spread the story of the young whistle blowers. The trio began the Falling Whistles Bike Tour in St. Augustine on July 1, weaving through the south with their message of peace to arrive in San Diego, CA on August 14.

Tony, Ben and Seth shared some of their incredible experiences with us upon their return to Florida, inspiring all of us to blow the whistle on the horrific tragedy facing the Congolese people.

How did you guys come up with the idea for the Falling Whistles Bike Tour?

Tony: I had the idea to ride to California for fun, but when I brought the idea to Ben and Seth we all decided it would be a great opportunity to network for Falling Whistles. They had met the organization’s founder in San Diego while they were working with another non-profit. So the trip became a networking tour, pretty much just making friends and spreading awareness about the cause. We wanted to help create a larger network for Falling Whistles and spread awareness about what’s going on in the DR Congo.

How did others in the organization react to your idea for the bike tour?

Ben: they were so inspired by the idea of two wheels that they seriously contemplated launching a scooter tour. They hung a 4′ x 8′ map of the U.S. in the office with cut-out paper bikes which they moved in conjunction with our trip.

How did you decide on the route you’d take?

Seth: The main goal was San Diego, but we pretty much set up stops according to what we could ride each day. We also made stops in cities where we had some contacts already set up.

Tony: The route also changed along the way as we learned more about our riding and by talking to local folks who knew the area.

How did you prepare physically for the tour? Before this, what was the furthest you’d ever ridden?

Seth: We didn’t really prepare that much. The longest I’d ridden before the tour was 40 miles. Both Tony and Ben had ridden about 25 miles before the trip.

What kinds of bikes were you riding? How often did you break down?

Tony: We rode touring frames, which are pretty much a longer and sturdier version of a road bike. I had a great deal of trouble with flats, probably four a week. Ridiculous. We did our own repairs; I carried the bike tools and extra equipment.

Seth: My rack buckled under the weight of my bag and nearly caused an accident on the side of the road at 2:30 a.m. one in morning. Tony found a pole in the woods and used his Eagle Scout skills to lash the rack back together. It was good as new.

Did you any other major problems during the trip?

Seth: Not really. We were all surprised how smoothly it all went.

Tony: We learned that just because a GPS says there is a road doesn’t always mean there is one.

Ben: While riding from a deli to a Hardee’s my front tire hit a pothole and I re-injured my knee. As soon as I hit the hole, I couldn’t bend it, and Seth and Tony had to help me into the Hardee’s. After that, I flew out to work in the Falling Whistles office.

What were some of your most memorable experiences during the tour?

Seth: Early in the trip we stayed the night behind a church and the priest suggested we ride to Washington, D.C. to get Obama out of there. We also ate a great deal of lucky charms.

Ben: Yelling at every farm animal we passed — until one looked at us with a terribly sad face. I felt bad and never yelled at another farm animal.

Tony: Riding through the early dawn dew of North Florida and Alabama. Getting closer to my brother and Seth was great as well.

What was the most arduous leg of the tour?

Tony: Ben’s leg was the most difficult (laughs). On the last day we did 25 straight hours through ridiculous California mountains. We rode from Yuma, Arizona to Pacific Beach, California. It was about 170 miles, by far the hardest day of my life. That was the furthest we traveled in one day without stopping.

Isn’t it true that Texas seems never to end?

Seth: Yes, that’s correct.

Tony: Texas is weird.

Ben: Flying over Texas was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.

What did you miss most during the tour?

Tony: Waves and friends.

Seth: California burritos and San Diego weather.

Ben: My girlfriend, Veronica. I wore spandex shorts the whole time, so I missed wearing regular shorts.

What were you eating during the journey — and where were you sleeping?

Tony: We ate a lot of couscous and Nutella on bagels.

Seth: … and Subway.

Tony: We stayed with friends, camped anywhere we could and stayed in cheapo motels.

Seth: We spent one night at a city playground and I slept on the jungle gym. It was terrible.

Which city stop left the fondest memories for you?

Seth: Bogalusa, Louisiana. We stayed with a great couple, Boris and Amy. Boris is a chef and we got some badass home cookin’.

Tony: Austin, Texas. We met some great people and were really taken care of. That city is pretty rad and has a great music scene. Plus, my girlfriend flew out to see me while we were there.

In general, how were you and your message received?

Tony: People along the way were incredible. We were offered free meals and places to stay from complete strangers who supported what we were doing.

What do you find is one of the most misunderstood facets of the strife in the DR Congo?

Seth: It’s not a fight against “good guys” and “bad guys,” it’s a fight between various groups with multiple motives, including political power, control of natural resources and self defense.

Have you ever met any of the children whose stories inspired Falling Whistles?

Seth: I haven’t met any children from DRC, but I have met child soldiers from Northern Uganda, and their struggle is very similar. The situation in the DRC isn’t really improving, just going through cycles. Hopefully, with the work Falling Whistles and other organizations are doing, that will change soon.

Do you feel you’ve achieved what you set out to do, now that it’s over?

Seth: The route didn’t really provide the best networking opportunities, so tying a tour in with a bike trip proved more difficult than we thought.

Tony: As our first try at something like this, I think it went well.

What kind of progress has Falling Whistles made since you finished the tour?

Ben: While we were actually on tour they were able to launch their first program — basically a micro-economic program teaching vocational skills in the DRC. They’re making more progress every day.

Has this tour inspired you to conceive of any other trips to help spread the Falling Whistles message?

Tony: It definitely helped open our minds to the possibilities of touring, but not with Falling Whistles exclusively. I think we learned that getting involved doesn’t necesarily mean working for or donating to an organization. Just doing what you’re good at to benefit others can be just as powerful.

What was the first thing you did once you finally reached the end of the journey?

Seth: (Laughs.) Ate a huge sandwich on my porch in gorgeous San Diego weather.

Tony: Booked a flight back.

What can people do to help Falling Whistles?

Ben: Visit the site — www.fallingwhistles.com — and you’ll see various opportunities to help the organization move forward, including internships and hosting speaking events.

Tony: It’s really easy to get involved; you just need be creative.

Learn more about Falling Whistles at www.fallingwhistles.com, and read Seth’s blog of the tour archived at www.fallingwhistlesbiketour.com.

Nancy Dillen
What constitutes a “Florida Artist”?

If you say that, foremost, one has to be from Florida, then you ignore the many artists who’ve been born elsewhere and have moved here to create. It also might discount a number of artists who live beyond our borders, yet still draw inspiration from Florida environs from afar. The answer, then, might lie in the landscape of the State itself as a prominent subject. But is it enough to have rendered the beach, a ramshackle shack, the swaying palms, or that particular orange hue of sunlight on canvas to earn the “Florida Artist” distinction?

There’s a common visual language all Florida artists employ, a wholly different vocabulary of images than that of, say, Michigan, but it can be argued that the true Florida artists use it to convey the often contentious relationship between nature and urban development. At the heart of all of our best regional art is that struggle, so unique to Floridians, and whether overtly addressed or suggested symbolically, it’s a conflict that’s rarely resolved without descending into kitsch. Too often, Florida art avoids depicting the existence of encroaching condominiums in favor of showing untouched pockets of pristine beauty. Other times, the problem is addressed baldly, with an almost pessimistic resignation to the onslaught of uglifying progress.

Eau Gallie-based artist Nancy Dillen approaches the issue in an altogether different way. Through the use of what many call “magic realism,” Dillen, who was born in Quincy, just shy of the Georgia border, depicts Florida’s constant state of flux as part of a necessary, though sometimes painful aspect of a greater evolution. Though Dillen is honest about the absence of any intended “hidden meaning” in her highly original paintings, each appears to comment on the adaptable nature of both Florida’s environment and its inhabitants. It’s a refreshingly new approach that imbues her designation as one of the preeminent Florida artists working today with deeper significance.

A retrospective of Nancy Dillen’s intense and colorful work this month at Highway Grrls Gallery and Studio in downtown Eau Gallie will provide art lovers with an overview of some of her finest pieces, some of them her most recent. Peopled with fantastical creatures and shapes from a surreal world in a heightened state of flux of its own, each is informed by the magical facets driving every instance of change and adaptation, however minor. Even ones as fanciful as the striking “Cuckoo Land” hint that no matter how weird things can get, life — in even the strangest, most inscrutable of forms — will continue on. Even the woodchucks (a favorite wildlife subject) popping up in the comparatively realistic landscape of “Chuck Talk Qua” seem proud of the underground existence they’ve eked out safely below our confused and deluded world. Though dwarfed by the sweeping vista of rolling hills behind them, the chucks exude a kind of dignified resilience — an encapsulation of the idea that seemingly insignificant things will always find a way to endure.

All this transformative magic unfolds in the 1926 Florida cracker house Dillen has painstakingly restored over the years with her husband Rick. Within spitting distance of the Eau Gallie Causeway, the house itself is a testament to Dillen’s love of the indomitable. In her studio, which looks out over the Indian River, everyday objects twist themselves into elastic, exaggerated shapes. With several swathes of vibrant color, a tape dispenser becomes a cartoonish jester, a bottle a writhing weasel. But this current magic realism phase is just one of many Dillen’s enjoyed dwelling in.

After graduating from FSU with an M.A. in Art Education and Constructive Design in 1971, Dillen settled in Melbourne, where she became the lone art instructor at BCC, teaching everything from drawing to ceramics. During her 35 years on the faculty there, she oversaw the art program’s expansion into a more efficient and effective eight-person department. Apart from brief yet pivotal stints teaching on Vancouver Island, BC and studying in Gatlinburg, TN, Dillen has lived and breathed Florida life to the hilt, and like every true Floridian, has accepted the rough of hurricanes and construction with the smooth of river rhythms and warm afternoon rain showers.

As a guest lecturer, juror, exchange instructor and art consultant who is recognized both nationally and internationally, Dillen gives back to the art community she’s so devoted to. As a painter, she’s explored the themes of nature, wildlife, and still-life subjects from a variety of inventive thematic angles. The mid-’80s saw her dealing with the the passage of time, memories, and loss in paintings like “Red Trees.” Environmental concerns rear their heads in her “Barrier Series” of the late ’80s, a collection of both real and imaginary landscapes that reflect a rural life at odds with encroaching urbanism. After teaching a plein-air class at Gatlinburg’s Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in 1991, Dillen began her “Woodchuck Series,” chronicling the creatures’ search for a place of their own.

Now recently retired from teaching, Dillen is painting full-time, exhibiting, creating art for public places (like the mosaic plinth she helped design for the Eau Gallie Redevelopment Association), and hosting workshops both locally and internationally. But to her, art and teaching are one in the same, and each offers exciting opportunities for new challenges and discoveries. Armed only with a brush and an active imagination, Nancy Dillen teaches all of us to look at every change we see not as a potential extinction, but an enduring evolution. And while it might seem like a revolutionary idea, it’s one every Floridian should embrace with similarly imaginative fervor.

Robin Rothrock’s Highway Grrls Gallery and Studio (1414 Highland Ave., in the heart of the Eau Gallie Arts District) celebrates Nancy Dillen’s 30 Years of Art in Brevard County with a retrospective of her work on October 2 from 5:30 to 9 p.m. during the area’s “First Friday Art Walk.” The opening, which is free and open to the public, ushers in the show planned to run through November 5. Enjoy refreshments, live music, and wonderful art. To find out more, visit www.robinrothrock.com or call the gallery at 777-9420. Nancy Dillen will also be teaching a two-day painting workshop at the Brevard Art Museum (1463 Highland Ave. in the Eau Gallie Arts District), October 17 and 18 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. The class is open to beginners through advanced levels. Call 254-7782 to register. Her work can also be seen at the LoPressionism Gallery in downtown Melbourne (101-B E. New Haven Ave.; 722-6000). More information on Nancy Dillen, including a large portfolio of her paintings, can be found at www.dillenart.com

If you were to compile a list of essential stops and sights for a guidebook called “The East Coast Surfer’s Pilgrimage Route,” you might have a hard time justifying the inclusion of Twombly’s Nautical Furniture in Cocoa Beach. Barring the weathered pirate statue standing out front, it’s a pretty innocuous looking edifice, one that offers scant indication of the treasures amassed within its walls. Plus, it’s a furniture shop.

Yet like a nondescript chapel that sleeps in the shadows cast by the larger, more imposing cathedrals that surround it, Twombly’s rewards visitors seeking the true spirit of surfing with forgotten relics, curios and stories, all tended loyally by an unassuming archivist in its owner, artist Joe Twombly.

Now Twombly would be the first to scoff at the notion that what he creates is art, yet after some gentle prodding, he concedes that the trade he began so prosaically involves something more than mindless assemblage. To him, all his work stems from surfing — the sport itself and the ideas and culture that encompass it — and it’s hard to steer him away from the subject toward the one we’d come to discuss. After a few hours of talking and scanning photos and clippings of his early days surfing the east coast, I returned to my shabby office to transcribe my collected notes. Here were accounts of trips and both minor and epic tales about Mike Tabeling, Dick Catri, Claude Codgen, Gary Propper, Mimi Munro, Gary Propper, and Bruce Valluzzi, along with intertwining chronologies of each character’s careers — and hardly a page about the sea-themed tables he fashions in his studio-cum-factory. This interview, I figured, would surely put my skills as a writer to the test.

But much like a pilgrim in search of the gilded, gleaming reliquary who’s finally faced with an ordinary wooden box after an arduous trek, I soon discovered that I’d stumbled upon something far more precious than the obvious grail. Giving my notes a closer look, each disparate episode and footnote swirled about magically to form the image I’d been seeking. Whether by accident or design, Twombly, a kind of befuddling surf mystic, had actually answered each of my pointed questions about what he does with refreshing candor. The greater questions for any artist, it turns out, shouldn’t focus on what they create, but where each creation springs from. To get my answer, I had to understand Twombly himself.

As soon as we arrive in the small showroom that greets visitors to his shop, Twombly sits down to regale us with an effusive account of his life on the water. What develops is a conversation filled with riotous laughter, silence for those who’ve passed, and inventive non sequiturs that, while at first confusing, shed brilliant light on dusty legends. Cabinets are opened, and attention is drawn to faded clippings, crinkled photos, and framed portraits of old friends. On paper, the facts read like a Bulfinch’s Mythology entry on surfing luminaries, but not once does the engaging Twombly fall back on empty name-dropping or deluded “when I was your age”-didacticism.

These stories and moments are as alive today in Twombly’s mind as they were 20 years ago, and like a shaman, he imbues them with warm breath for privileged listeners. Never coming across as the retired general who pulls out old medals, the better to see his reflection in their polished surface, Twombly’s modest speech is full of praise for others. Tabeling, Catri, Propper — they’re not untouchable idols here, but real people. Where a lesser chronicler would simply lump them all into an indistinguishable pile of “The Best,” Twombly enumerates all their finest qualities as only a true friend could. Tabeling? The most adventurous and courageous, convincing Twombly to take his first terrified night surf. Propper? The most encouraging and enthusiastic, like the time he grabbed a 13-year-old Twombly by the arm during a session to tell onlookers that Joe would be a surfer someday. There are hilarious tales of Catri and countless others that arise. But Twombly himself? He just happened to be there.

At one point, he shows us a photo album of a 1969 trip to Martinique with some friends. Several timeless shots elicit more uproarious laughter, a few others some sadness for friends who’ve since died. “Here’s some of the kids there paddling out on poles,” he indicates. “They had long pieces of rubber as leashes. They were way ahead of their time!” Another National Geographic-worthy photo shows some small figures looking out at the surf in beaming afternoon sunlight. “They let those kids out of school to watch us surf,” he recalls. Setting it back into a cabinet drawer, Twombly says: “It was the time of our lives” without a trace of the mournfulness you’d expect. While he’s understandably wistful about an idyllic era that ended, it seems to inject him with uncontainable enthusiasm rather than melancholy. Just having lived it informs the present, a present still filled with discovery, creativity and fun.

Twombly’s induction into the East Coast Surfing Hall of Fame in 2000 and his current Vice Presidency of the institution already speaks volumes about his dedication to the sport’s ethos, but still he reserves special credit for friends who helped make the East Coast surfer such a unique cultural force. They’re friends he met when his family settled in the area in back in 1963 after following the Twombly patriarch (who worked in military intelligence) from jobs in Tokyo, California, Baltimore, New York and Panama. “Baseball was my thing,” he says of those years. “I didn’t get into surfing until later.”

His older sister Betsy gave him his first real introduction to surfing shortly after they arrived in Florida, and the two shared his first board, a James & O’Hare. After a few years of honing his innate surfing skills up and down the coast, Twombly earned early fame helping the Surfboards Hawaii team rise to prominence. In 1967, Twombly caught the eye of Hobie Alter, who recruited him to his team and helped pay his college tuition. While at Florida Tech, Twombly, now on the cusp of marriage (he and wife Sue have been married for 37 years), studied political science, vaguely thinking that he’d go into public relations. “Look up the word ‘ambiguous’,” he says, “and that’s me.” With the help of some skills acquired while working local construction, he made his first tables out of some recovered materials as a hobby. “We needed a coffee table,” he remembers, laughing. “I built one in the apartment and resined the top in the living room. I destroyed the carpet, of course, and the lady who lived downstairs came up bitching about the smell.”

Inspired by the aquatic environment he’d come to love, Twombly began making tables, stools and other pieces for people who’d heard about them from friends. Starting with deep, curved wooden frames as vessels, as he’s done here since 1972, Twombly arranges indigenous shells, coral, small fish, crustaceans and flotsam into three-dimensional “mosaics” of color and form. Customers can choose to employ Twombly’s shells and minutiae (bought from local divers), their own, or a mixture of both. It takes an instinctively artistic eye to place them in a way that disguises their having been touched by human hands. Successfully replicating the randomness of nature and capricious tides as only a devoted waterman could, Twombly then covers each seascape with layers of clear epoxy resin to create the illusion of water.

Helped by friend and store manager Mike Meyer here in the back shop room (“The Nexus,” they call it), Twombly has made pieces for more than 30 Carnival Cruise ships, over 250 restaurants, and thousands of private customers, including a sultan from Dubai who hired him to make some railings for his yacht. Trying to count the number of pieces he’s done proves difficult (“hundreds of thousands”); reciting the roster of restaurants even more so (“Honestly, I can’t remember them all”). Twombly’s first piece was for the now defunct Captain Ed’s at the Port, and he’s since made gorgeous resin-coated tables for Ron Jon’s Cape Caribe Resort, Cocoa Beach Surf Company’s Shark Pit, Breakfast At Lily’s, Bernard’s Surf, Makoto’s, Roberto’s, Taco City, Florida Seafood Bar & Grill, Canaveral Pier, Dixie Crossroads, Grills, and the PAFB Officer’s Club, as well as many decorative pieces for Disney and EPCOT’s Chinese Pavilion.

Smaller pieces like end tables can take up to five or six weeks to complete, while larger pieces require about two months’ work, some of which incorporate vintage nautical items like compasses, coils of rope, small portholes, hatch covers and brass panels recovered from WWII ships — even capstan bases. Crouching down to look at a particularly wide oceanscape table from a child’s vantage point offers a seabed view of the scene within. Behind a leaf of fan coral lurks a blue crab, a few minute grains of sand floating near his carapace suggesting movement frozen in time. To the right, two quarter-sized fish veer vertically over a spiky pink conch and a small scattering of sand dollars and ray egg casings. It’s the kind of view usually only divers are privy to, but one Twombly seems to conjure up intuitively from years of being out on the water.

You could say that it’s this quality — this marriage of beauty and functionality — that brings people the world over to Twombly’s shop. That it also happens to be an important spot in local history, however unlikely, seems lost on many of them. But to a lucky few, Twombly’s tables aren’t just furniture, but talismans of a soul touched indelibly by the ocean.

And knowing someone like Joe Twombly made them only increases their value even more.

Twombly’s Nautical Furniture is located at 101 Manatee Lane in Cocoa Beach. To find out more about Joe Twombly’s tables, stop by the showroom, call 783-8610, or visit www.twomblysnauticalfurniture.com

Local artist and gallery owner Karen McDonald describes herself as always having been “artsy-craftsy,” dabbling in disciplines like batik, stained glass, decoupage, candle making and tole painting since her teens. But she always thought she couldn’t draw and wasn’t “good at art.” All that changed when she enrolled in a night class about 15 years ago while living in San Diego.

“I had an urge to take a night class and wanted something artistic,” she recalls. “Believing I couldn’t handle paint and a brush, but loving color, I chose a colored pencil class. I surprised myself by actually doing a pretty good job at it, so then I took a watercolor class. Well, I was hooked.” Karen describes loving the process from the first stroke, and when her yellow and orange dabs blended into each other, she found they’d formed a beautiful pear. It’s on that ebullient sense of discovery art holds that she founded her bright and wonderfully eclectic Art on Fifth Gallery in downtown Indialantic this past March, and the inspiring story of its conception is filled with similar serendipitous moments.

After creating that first pear, she continued taking watercolor classes, and after a few years, began to feel comfortable enough with drawing to consider pursuing an art-oriented career. To that end, she began teaching art in after-school classes at local elementary schools, to groups of home schoolers out of a garage, and in several small private studios.

Seven years ago, when Karen and her husband relocated to Brevard with their two sons, she continued taking watercolor classes, unaware that a new discovery was waiting for her just around the corner. “I never thought I would venture into any other medium because I loved the magic of watercolor so much, but one day I saw an acrylic painting of tulips by Fritz Van Eeden,” she tells me. “It was so exciting and different from what watercolor could do. I just had to learn how to paint like that.” She soon signed up for her first acrylic class with  beloved Satellite Beach artist Heather Everett, who at the time ran a studio on South Patrick. “Heather was so much fun and so encouraging,” Karen says. “She introduced me to the fun of acrylic painting with splattering and dripping and texture building techniques. I did a painting of tulips that really didn’t look anything like Fritz’s, but I loved it anyway.”

Excited to find that Van Eeden taught classes of his own, Karen enrolled in several workshops, learning to coax rich, bold and wild effects from acrylics in the style she so admired. She continued painting in both watercolor and acrylics, but couldn’t resist other classes being offered at the Brevard Art Museum — stained glass, fused glass, PMC (precious metal clay) and pottery. “By then,” says Karen, “I felt like I was so spoiled and having so much fun delving into all of this art, that I felt like I should be making some money to fund my art habit.”

Using her degree in secondary education, Karen, who’s held a variety of jobs over the years (including civil draftsman and real estate appraiser), started teaching art to 1st through 8th-graders at a small parochial school in Rockledge, something she regards as “a huge challenge.” “It was also lots of fun, and a great learning experience for me, but the stress of handling everything that goes with that job was tremendous,” she tells me. After a year there, Karen began teaching classes at Akademia in Indialantic before opening her own studio, Art ‘n Soul, in the Lori Laine Center on South Patrick.

“It was a pretty small space and not very visible as far as a business location, but I just wanted a studio where I could do my own art and teach some classes,” she explains. “It turned out that I loved it so much and I had became involved in offering classes in so many different media that I felt like I was being squeezed out of that space, so I decided I needed to either scale back or expand. When I found the space on Fifth Avenue, I knew that was where I wanted to be.”

The location turned out to be the perfect place for Art on Fifth. Only few blocks from the beach, the gallery boasts a well-lit front area and a large studio space at the rear where Karen and other artists teach workshops and where openings and special events are held. “When I opened, the only pieces in here besides mine were a few of Heather’s dramatic acrylic paintings and some of Alice Ahrens’ whimsically colorful watercolors. There are so many wonderfully talented artists in this area. It’s amazing,” Karen beams. “Every few days, another artist comes through the door to see what’s going on in the gallery, and they end up bringing their artwork in.” Thanks to Art on Fifth’s inclusive, open-minded ethos, over 40 artists are represented in the gallery, among them: Damien Share, Frank Palmieri, Jeff Leppard, Mary Moon, Paul Ero, and Viola Pace Knudsen.

During the summer, Karen offers multi-media camps in the afternoon, and mini-camps in the mornings taught by some of the gallery’s artists, including Mike Bryan, who taught caricatures, Heather Everett (painting), Alice Ahrens (tiki carving), and Panther Staton who taught charcoal drawing. Staton’s courses proved so popular that she’ll be returning to teach next month, along with New Smyrna Beach’s Carolyn Land, who’ll be hosting collage workshops September 14th and 15th and again on the 21st and 22nd. Weekly after-school classes are divided by age group at Art on Fifth, and are designed to be malleable according to the ever-changing nature of kids’ and parents’ schedules.

Karen explains. “I do 10 week packages, but they’re flexible as far as not being required to be attended consecutively. You pay for ten classes, and come ten times, so kids don’t have to lose a class because they want to go to the beach or have a dentist appointment. I want them to be glad they can come to class, and not have to miss another fun opportunity because they ‘have to go’ to art class.” This welcome adaptability extends to other aspects of the classes. “I do have a daily project for each class, but the kids are always welcome to choose another project. The classes are for their enjoyment and learning. I’m there to encourage, support, and inspire them to get to where they want to be with their art. One thing I’ve learned is that there are guidelines in art,” Karen continues, “but there are certainly no rules. Just because one technique or method works for one person, doesn’t mean it’s the only way to get to a successful result. And it’s successful if the artist likes it.”

Each month, Karen transforms the studio area into an extension of the gallery for openings and shows. In July, the brightly colorful paintings of Jeff Leppard inspired Art On Fifth’s fun-filled “Life’s a Beach” show, which featured beach-related art by 20 local artists. Due to its overwhelming success, August’s show, entitled “Jewels of the Sea” and slated for Saturday, August 22nd from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m., will feature beach-inspired hand-made jewelry and accessories.

Despite its great location, Art on Fifth is somewhat hard to find. “I do have a visibility issue,” Karen admits. “I feel like we’re kind of invisible in between these two big buildings, but several artists are working on ideas for sculptures we could install to at least draw attention to the gallery.”

Until that time, regard Art on Fifth as a hidden treasure that’s well worth the hunt.

Art on Fifth is located at 425 Fifth Avenue in downtown Indialantic between Riverside Bank and the ReMax office. Parking is in the rear, so if you’re driving, enter from Sixth Avenue to the parking behind the building. You’ll be amazed not only by both the variety and the quality of artwork, but by their reasonable prices as well. Expect an eclectic collection of watercolors, acrylic and oil paintings, pottery, jewelry, baskets, fabric art, wood carvings, and tikis. To find out more about monthly classes and events, call 724-4490. Check back with the Resident next month for gallery-related announcements.

It’s said you can tell a lot about a person by the car they drive. If that’s the case, then surely the woodie owner rides in the most revealing and loquacious of biographers.

The woodie is undeniably fetching, yet it exudes the kind of understated and approachable attractiveness you find in the girl next door, the one you’ve had your eye on since first grade. It whispers the sort of comfortable affluence earned by dint of hard work and deep appreciation for days off rather than the inherited, windfallen wealth other vintage roadsters seem to shout as they pass. Even when parked, with no driver in sight, it tells you that its owner is down-to-earth, laid-back, and respectful of history, more at ease on the simpler, scenic roads of life than on the crowded freeways of modernity. Not that he’ll completely avoid them though, because they’re often the fastest way to the beach — and the woodie owner is at heart a surfer. His car is as indispensable as his board, and the road that takes him to the wave just as worthy of riding.

I’m sure if you listen closely, you can hear the five models woodie builder Erik Johnson owns singing a chorus of praise to their guardian and caretaker, but it’s hard to make out beneath the din made by thousands of his other children — spread out from Florida to Hawaii — who have plenty to say about their beloved father. It’s in Treehouse Woods, Johnson’s cluttered Cocoa Beach woodworking shop-cum-garage, that many of the country’s woodies saw the first light of day or were nursed back to health, thanks to his abiding love for this quintessentially American car.

As Johnson sees it, woodies symbolize “lost youth, freedom and fun.” He saw his first specimens while surfing in the New England of his own youth and never forgot the impact they made on him, nor the emotions they still conjure. “Nowadays,” Johnson says, “a lot of baby boomers have grown up thinking back on the carefree summers of their childhood. And now that their own kids have grown up and gone off to college, they need a toy of their own.” While most customers are doctors, lawyers, and businessmen, Johnson is quick to dispel any notion that woodies are simply exclusive collectibles for the well-heeled. “Woodie lovers come from all backgrounds, really. Everyone can appreciate and relate to them.”

It’s democratic qualities like these that attract woodie enthusiasts to their charges, vehicles that were originally built less for their aesthetic appeal than for their economy and practicality. The first prototypes appeared in 1910 and were known as “depot hacks,” favored for their spaciousness and the efficiency with which they shuttled encumbered travelers back and forth between hotels and train stations, hence the origin of their other name, “station wagons.” In the ’20s, more refined versions were being fashioned as chauffeured conveyances for Henry Ford’s illustrious cronies, men like Edison and DuPont, who reveled in the rare, bird’s-eye maple panels that adorned them. Subsequent decades saw them serving as America’s early SUV, with nearly every major car manufacturer in the country producing models with panels hewn from cheaper more prevalent woods like birch, ash, mahogany and common maple.

Woodies began their decline during the ’50s and ’60s when manufacturers realized pure steel bodies were less costly and labor-intensive to produce. Owners found them to be labor-intensive, too; without proper care, most succumbed quickly to the elements and were abandoned roadside or left to moulder in scrapyards. Surfers, then enjoying their heyday and just on the cusp of an excited diaspora, found them to be cheap workhorses, ideal for carrying boards and friends and duly expressive of their resourceful, individualistic attitudes. Today, woodies are usually associated with the California lifestyle, Funicello and Avalon films, and, of course, the Beach Boys.

But the ones that first spoke to Johnson were seen on the East Coast where he learned to surf. He made his first trip to Cocoa Beach from Massachusetts in 1969 before serving in Vietnam and returned to settle here in 1974, drawn by the Southeast Asian-like climate and lifestyle to which he’d grown accustomed. It was while living across from the ocean at 6th Street South that the self-taught Johnson began collecting driftwood and making furniture for his woefully bare second-floor apartment. “People were coming over and taking notice of some of these pieces and asked me to start building things for them,” he remembers. “I worked on my porch with this great view out over the trees, and that’s how I came up with the name, ‘Treehouse Woods.’”

Woodies came back into Johnson’s life serendipitously in 1975, when a friend told him about two rusting 1940 models he’d seen for sale in Orlando for $7,000. “Of course, I didn’t have the money for them then and I was trying to start a wood shop,” he tells me, “but it stayed in the back of my mind. A few years later they were still there, and I couldn’t pass them up again. I got both for $3,000.” Johnson’s woodworking and carpentry skills came in handy at this stage, as did earlier experience building hot rods in high school. “I had to teach myself how to repair them, but I restored those first two and bought some more. Now it’s a passion that’s just gotten way out of control,” he laughs.

Now nearly 30 years at his shop on Brevard Avenue, Johnson combines a variety of impressive skills with that passion to refurbish, restore and build custom and vintage woodies from scratch. Few shops in the country specialize in this type of work; even fewer do it as well as Johnson. When he can’t find parts — everything down to brackets and miniscule hinges — he makes them himself, often working from molds he had the foresight and ingenuity to fashion over the years. Though Ford wagons from 1935-1951 are closest to his heart, Johnson is also adept at repairing and creating models of all makes and years from chassis and molds he’s made of frames. Apart from planing, sanding and shaping wood into doors, tailgates, window moldings and roofs, he also does the varnishing, interior work, wiring, and engine repairs, all painstaking processes that involve a fantastic eye for detail.

Often working on several projects at a time, Johnson still finds time to do the unique woodworking that first brought him success. “We are refusing to participate in this recession,” he says matter-of-factly. “The country needs to learn to get up in the morning and go to work.” To that end, Johnson is devoting more time to doing custom woodwork, from made-to-specification furniture to fit odd spots in customers’ homes to repairing broken pieces that might otherwise be thrown out. His portfolio reveals a wide variety of creations: boat interiors, architectural flourishes and ornaments, cabinets, bookcases, entertainment centers, full kitchens, bed frames and sofas.

Still though, you get the feeling that what really gets Johnson up in the morning is that passion woodies first kindled in him all those years ago, one that’s as warm and organic as the very substance they’re made from. “It never fails to amuse me that when a person sees a woodie, the first thing they do is smile.”

“I feel like I’m helping make the world a better place,” he says, with just the sort of selfless cheer you’d expect from a proud woodie owner.

Treehouse Woods is located at 112 N. Brevard Ave. in Cocoa Beach. Call 783-6781, or visit www.woodiewood.com

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Its light weight and forgiving nature have also made it the material of choice for many Florida theme parks, with their emphasis on eye-catching, three-dimensional signage and whimsical structural effects. Disney alone is a virtual museum of architectural foam’s fantastic potential. During a brief stroll, you can see foam rocks and trees, embossed ceilings and fantastic friezes, many designed to create the illusion of antiquity.

In her roughly seven years as President and principal Designer for Rockledge’s Architectural FOAM & Art, Sharon Dixon has made her share of odd sculptures. But when I ask her to name her most unusual project, she’s simply stumped.

“What’s unusual?,” she responds. “A whale’s tail coming out of a porthole, a logo that spans 55 feet, an exploding car, a gargoyle, an Indian temple? I really don’t see any of them as unusual, I see them as challenging, and I love to figure out how to engineer something I’ve never done before.”

Sharon remembers that she was always working on some kind of art project during her Ohio childhood, often shaping her mother’s aluminum foil into roses she later painted. “Getting art supplies was always at the top of my Christmas wish list,” she tells me. Before receiving her graphic design degree and moving to Cocoa Beach in 1989, Sharon worked with Disney, Universal, SeaWorld and Kennedy Space Center, helping them create custom gift and stationery items for their retail locations. But it was while working on her design degree she began studying sculpture techniques in a fine arts class, something she continued to dabble in long after graduation. “I had a project that I was working on that required a mold to be made,” Sharon says. “I didn’t have any experience in mold making, so I stopped in at a local graphic shop. While I was there, I noticed a partially carved piece of foam. I thought, ‘Hmmm this is very interesting’.”

Sharon found out where to purchase the raw material and started experimenting with it. ”My original thought was to offer custom freelance services to the foam shops in the area, but after a very short time I realized that if I was going to make it work, I needed to invest in the equipment and learn the engineering program to be able to run some of the equipment that would be needed.” To that end, she founded Architectural FOAM & Art, which offers clients design, drawing and production services for custom architectural projects. “I guess you could say my exact title is: President, CEO, Director of Marketing, Artistic Designer, CAD Technician, Painter, Finisher and Shipping and Receiving Manager,” she says breathlessly. She employs a variety of architectural products, from hand-carved custom relief medallions and other architectural details to machine-cut forms such as crown moldings, capitals, corbels, relief carvings, columns, and medallions. Sharon’s 30-plus years of design experience provides customers with an unparalleled opportunity to create custom accents found nowhere else.

When she’s designing architectural elements for houses and buildings, Sharon draws inspiration from the Old Masters and history to evoke a time-worn style. Often, clients already have an idea of what they’re looking for, sometimes bringing in pictures she can work from. Sharon starts out with a design concept and “draws” it with the aid of CAD (computer aided drafting), which converts the image into a code that can be read by one of her computer controlled hotwire machines and begins cutting the expanded polystyrene foam, or EPS. In the case of  a hand-carved piece, the hotwire machine can help cut out a cookie cutter-type shape for further dimensional manipulation, which is completed with special hand tools. Once cut, the pieces are finished and hard coated for the the environment in which they’ll appear, each can be further finished and painted with a variety of products that can approximate the appearance of wood or metal or stone. Expanded polystyrene is incredibly durable, economical, long-lasting and doesn’t rot or decay, making it the ideal material for exterior architectural elements and details.

But it’s those unusual products that are likely to intrigue people the most. Locals will recognize her work on The Brevard Museum Of History and Natural Science and the newly-opened Dinosaur Store and Museum in Cocoa Beach, with its impressive Egyptian and Mayan-themed decorations. Others include the colorful “Paws On” sign for the expanded section of the Brevard Zoo, which includes a new petting area, a large water play zone, and a 20,000-gallon aquarium reflecting the wildlife of the Indian River Lagoon.  Also at the zoo, is her whale tail sign for a snack and sundries shop in the expanded section. And that exploding car? It was designed for Cocoa Beach High School’s performance of “Grease.” Currently, Sharon’s largest piece is the 55-foot high logo for Michelina condominiums in Cape Canaveral.

Regardless of whether they’re capricious sculptures based on cartoon imagery or stately cornices inspired by fin de siècle decor, each of her creations appeals to both aesthetic sensibilities and practical design. “Unless I’m working from an actual architectural rendering,” she explains, “it seems that most times clients may have an general idea of what they’re looking for, so in most cases, I have the ability to create custom designs for for them. Knowing the parameters of my material and equipment allows me to design to achieve maximum results. I love hearing a client say ‘That’s exactly what I had in mind.’ My goal is to to aways try to achieve more than what’s expected.”

Contact Sharon Dixon at 795-4533 for all your architectural design and accent needs, including custom design, fabrication and installation. Architectural FOAM & Art is located at 419 Hawk Street in Rockledge. She also has a small display in The Home Center , at the corner of Murrell Road and Viera Blvd. in Viera. Having recently installed machinery to recycle waste foam into packing material, Sharon has gone to great lengths to maintain a proper balance between her work and the environment. Visit her website at: www.architecturalfoamandart.com

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It’s rare that you come across an artist as self-effacing and generous as Fred Cheney. It’s even rarer to uncover one whose life story is as richly colorful as his own paintings, a life that seems to have ebbed and flowed in concert with the waters that have shaped the area’s history as a crucible of surf culture.

Born in the Panhandle on Eglin AFB in May of 1954, the son of a third-generation Floridian father and English-born artist mother, Fred moved with his family to Virginia when still an infant, and his earliest memories are of fishing in the Potomac River. At the age of 6, the Cheneys sailed to England, where father, Jim, was to be stationed for two years. “I started first grade there, but in England, they start first grade a year earlier and already know how to read and write,” Fred recalls. “So on my very first day of school, the teacher asked us to write an essay about what we did over the summer, and me, not knowing how to read or write yet, tried to get away with drawing a picture of my home back in the U.S. I think that was my first try at getting an idea across with an illustration instead of words.”

His father’s eventual transfer to Germany saw the family exploring Europe in a ‘63 Volkswagen Bug. In Rome, the Vatican and the Sistine Chapel made deep impressions, but in Paris Fred was mesmerized by the paintings of Leonardo de Vinci, Van Gogh, Monet and the Impressionists, in particular Seurat, whose pointillism stoked Fred’s still latent artistic fire.

After relocating the family back to Virginia in 1966, Jim got transferred to Hickam AFB just outside of Honolulu. This was to be a major shift for the 13-year-old Fred. “Instead of flying out there, we drove across the country then sailed to Hawaii on the SS Lurline. When we left L.A., the ocean was gray and cold, but about three days into the trip, it turned the most incredible color of blue I’d ever seen.”

“Living in Hawaii at that age during the late ’60s was life changing for me,” he continues. “I was lucky enough to get accepted to Punahou School in the Monoa Valley. From the top floor of one of the buildings we could check the surf way down the hill at Ala Moana. When my dad wasn’t traveling for work — he had to spend alot of time in Vietnam — he’d get up at three in the morning to take us to Town or Makaha or Barber’s Point to go surfing. He surfed too… They used to call him the ‘Surfing General of the Air Force.’”

Needless to say, the Cheney brothers had a blast there. It was around spots like Kaena Point that Fred witnessed the shortboard revolution firsthand. “This was when Joey Cabell won the Makaha Championship on a 9′6″ ‘mini-gun,” he remembers. “We immediately started cutting down our boards and re-shaping them into short boards. I’m sure many classic longboards were ruined that year…” This was a period of some great music, too. Fred and his brother attended concerts by the Doors, Jefferson Airplane, Iron Butterfly, and Jimi Hendrix — all of whose concert posters had a big influence on Fred’s burgeoning passion. “My first exposure to surf art was around that same time — Surfer Magazine with art by John Severson and Rick Griffin. I started drawing and painting alot during that time, mostly emulating the art that I saw around… I mean, who hasn’t ever drawn a flaming eyeball riding a surfboard?,” he laughs.

Then the inevitable happened. The war drew to a close and Jim was reassigned back to Washington D.C. “I thought the world had ended,” Fred tells me. “Going back was like some kind of reverse culture shock — hundreds of miles from the ocean, cold weather and no surf. I withdrew for a while and just stayed in my room and painted and drew.” Things eventually got better, though. Fred and his brother got into skateboarding the hills of D.C., making the best of the lack of waves. He soon realized that there was surf on the East Coast after meeting other surfers who took him to the beaches of Maryland and Virginia. It was also around this time that Fred discovered the airbrush. “I was still enthralled by the artwork on album covers, in particular the Grateful Dead, done by Rick Griffin or Kelly/Mouse Studios. Somebody told me they were done with airbrush, so I went and got one and started messing around with it. It was fun, and kind of magical.”

Yet another family move to Nag’s Head saw things beginning to gel for Fred. “We drove all night,” he tells me. “The next morning when I woke up, I couldn’t believe my eyes: 6-foot spitting tubes breaking less that 50 feet off the beach and no one out! I was hooked.” Not surprisingly, when it came time for Fred to choose a college, he picked the nearby East Carolina University where he taught airbrushing and studied design, photography, drawing, and printmaking. During his last year in college, Fred came to Satellite Beach to visit his parents who’d retired there. Natural Art’s Pete Dooley offered him a job airbrushing surfboards at his factory where he worked before joining Doug Wright’s Rainbow Surfboards. Soon after, he was hired by World Class, a screenprinting t-shirt company that catered mainly to the surf industry, a company he describes as more like a family. By this time, of course, Fred knew he’d be calling Brevard home.

While attending the Surf Expo with World Class in 1984, Fred connected with a representative for Jimmy Buffett’s Caribbean Soul, who asked him to come up with a t-shirt design for the first Margaritaville Store in Key West, one that’s recently been reissued by the company. He later drew for Harlequin Nature Graphics, which wholesaled designs to zoos, aquariums, resorts and stores worldwide. “At first we were doing all hand-separated designs — drawing dots with a rapidograph pen on transparent film — each color a separate layer — to burn onto a sceen to print the shirts. It was a very tedious way of working, but usually had great results. Later, I started using my airbrush with the air pressure turned down to simulate the rapidograph dots and speed up the process. As time went on, we eventually switched over to doing full-color artwork that was scanned and color-separated on computers.”

It was during these years that his love of photography, diving, fishing, sailing, wildlife and airbrush painting converged to create a new artistic voice for him. In 1996, Fred’s design for the Crawfish Fishing License Stamp was accepted by the FL Dept. of Environmental Protection. Indeed, much of his work reflects his respect for Florida’s unique environment. He usually starts with a detailed pencil sketch, sometimes using one of his photographs as a guide, before applying layers of transparent color with the airbrush. While many take hundreds of hours to finish, Fred is sustained by the thrill of seeing how real and lifelike he can make his subjects look.

From his Satellite Beach studio, the same one he shared with his late mother for over 20 years, Fred Cheney, true to generous form, passes on that thrill to thousands of admirers throughout the world.

Fred Cheney’s paintings can currently be seen at The Surf Gallery in Indialantic (826 N. Miramar Ave.; 951-2787). Fred is available for t-shirt designs, commissioned paintings, drawings, murals, and all manner of computerized graphic design. He can be contacted at his home studio by phone (321) 773-8407, or by email: fcheney@cfl.rr.com. Visit his website online at: www.airwavesgraphics.com.

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Called “New Criticism,” the philosophy would steer the dissection a poem like Coleridge’s undeniably trippy “Kubla Khan” based solely on its metrical merits without regard to its having been way ahead of its time (it was penned in 1797, a century-and-a-half before Jim “Lizard King” Morrison was even born), or its having been written during an opium-induced hallucination.

The trend eventually carried over into the equally fractious world of art criticism during the ’70s, and attempted to convince professors (and, by extension, viewers) that one shouldn’t judge Van Gogh’s turbulent “Wheatfield with Crows” by the well-known fact that the poor guy was off his damn rocker and months away from committing suicide when he painted it.

New Criticism has largely been discredited as the work of people who were off their own damn rockers, but it still has its stubborn adherents, people who’d seek to strip Cocoa artist Jacqueline Endlich’s artwork of some of its most fascinating qualities.

Taken on their own, they’re breathtakingly beautiful and evidence enough of a highly-skilled eye and hand. Knowing Endlich’s story isn’t necessary to appreciate them, but it does imbue them with richer shades of meaning and vitality, something New Critics failed to fully understand. Art is made by human beings — it doesn’t just appear out of the ether — and such creations are, by the very nature of their existence, products of unique individuals, complex minds, and multi-varied experiences.

Born in El Paso, Texas, Jacqueline Endlich arrived in Florida at the age of 10, armed with a love of painting and sketching passed on by her father, a deep respect for nature, and a crippling fear of the water, which is incredible when you consider the deep understanding of sea life her art reveals, and indeed requires.

“I was terrified of the water after my mother made me watch ‘Jaws’ as a kid,” she laughs. “I’d go into the river or the ocean, but always stay knee-deep.” That first viewing of “Jaws” took place years before her arrival in Merritt Island when the Endlichs lived in the Southwest — Colorado, New Mexico, and Tucson, Arizona — all happily landlocked locations. But Endlich was by no means skittish when it came to the outdoors. An avid biker, camper, hiker, amateur botanist, zoologist and conservationist, and self-confessed “tomboy,” Endlich was enticed into the idea of relocating to Florida by her mother’s promise of “millions of lizards” she could catch and study.

Since early childhood, Endlich had been drawing Southwestern flora and fauna, as well as Native American subjects and motifs copied from her father, an accomplished pen-and-ink artist in his own right. She began taking art seriously at the age of 6. “I was kind of antisocial as a kid,” she recalls, and while fond of the outdoors, she remembers making excuses to get out of social engagements so she could stay at home and draw. The eventual move to Merritt Island brought a flood of new inspirations, and Endlich soon began turning her hand to palm trees, boating and river scenes, sunsets, and those beloved lizards. Melbourne Beach watercolorist Peter Bailey was also a strong influence, as several of his originals hung in the Endlich home.

“At first I was devastated that I had to leave the mountains,” Endlich says. “I’d just begun getting used to a harsh, difficult landscape. But I was just entranced by all the exciting new wildlife and Florida’s unique environment.” Though she still considers herself to be a dyed-in-the-wool mountain girl, Florida runs like water through her veins — the water she once feared — and the idea of leaving Florida is now equally inconceivable.

Around the time she began attending Jr. High, she overcame that fear, adding kayaking and snorkeling to her list of hobbies, and began cast-netting off her dock and fishing with her father under the 528 bridge. “I didn’t even know what I was catching,” she says. “But I got a canoe and started exploring more and learning about the area’s fish and marine life. I felt I’d found my niche.” By the time she enrolled in Marathon High School after the family’s relocation to the Keys, it seems Endlich had clocked in more hours on the water than many fishermen twice her age. Here in the Keys, she honed her craft and began creating more intricate images, ones that incorporate lures, coral, mangroves, and hibiscus — all of which often frame images of Florida fish that would be the envy of the exacting J.J. Audubon.

But Endlich’s fish aren’t cold, mathematical studies. While highly-detailed, they also bear the unmistakeable mark of being handled up close and appreciated for their beauty, not just their place in taxonomic hierarchy. While living in the Keys, and later while studying biology at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, she began implementing design elements into her pictures in the vein of Guy Harvey and other Key West artists devoted to marine wildlife subjects. Several of her pieces during this time became posters for fishing tournaments and other local events.

In August of 2006, Endlich’s mother, Linda Lanier, joined with her in creating the Cocoa-based MoGills, which specializes in a variety of products and accoutrements — merchandise like t-shirts, hats, bags and other accessories emblazoned with Endlich’s art. Endlich describes MoGills as “a very diverse small business; it’s ever-changing.” But despite its diversity and adaptability, it’s held together solidly by the meeting of Endlich’s discerning eye for design and Lanier’s impressive business acumen. Since its founding, MoGills has achieved vendor status at Bass Pro Shops and West Marine. Their hot sauces, made from an old family recipe, can be found locally at such places as Maine’ly Lobster, Sunrise Diner, the Omelet Station and Wild Ocean Seafood.

Through MoGills, both Endlich and Lanier are focused on giving back to the environment and the community through their involvement in fundraising for conservation programs and schools. They’re currently working on initiatives with 4-H and Connected By 25, which facilitates employment for young foster adults. “Our hope is to not only benefit our young adults with life enhancing employment opportunities, but also to benefit MoGills with cost-effective, reliable production services,” says Julia Irvin, Connected By 25 Brevard board chair. “These kinds of public-private partnerships are exactly what our society needs to provide long-term, sustainable solutions to social problems,” adds Lanier.

While all of this background isn’t an essential ingredient in the enjoyment of Endlich’s designs, it definitely enhances what’s already their inherent beauty. It’s something critics might argue the worth of, but what do critics know about art anyway?

Visit MoGills online to see samples of Jacqueline Endlich’s work at: www.mogillsstore.com.

Despite the place being filled with reminders of each passing minute, time seems to stand still at Time & Treasures clockmakers in Cocoa Beach.

It’s an odd, highly illogical impression, but one that’s borne out in the small workroom where Tom Lewis and Ron Riggs ply their trade, a trade that dates back to the 1st century BC, when complex systems of gears, weights and counterweights formed the core of the first prototypes of wind and water-driven clocks.

Even those early time-keeping machines were comprised of rudimentray “movements” — the heart, and indeed soul, as I learned — of every winding clock, and Lewis and Riggs’ workroom is fairly bulging with components of movements in various states of repair.

Here, organized neatly into compartments, are thousands of miniscule bushings, brass pins, cogs, springs, chains, and paper-thin, wheel-like gears, looking curiously like the disassembled bones of some long-forgotten species of dinosaur. But if that suggests a kind of extinction, Time & Treasures acts less like a museum than as a surgery or hospital, wherein these relics will soon be imbued with new life and vigor.

And much like doctors, Lewis and Riggs refer to their charges as patients that are not so much in need of “fixing” in the typical sense, as they are of TLC and meticulous adjustment. A clock that comes into their patient hands is never truly broken, but merely malfunctioning, as evinced by a shelf where three newer patients await the final stages of tweaking before being sent home in fine fettle to their respective owners. Often parts need replacing, and if they can’t be ordered, Lewis and Riggs can fashion new ones to keep things running smoothly.

An ingeniously simple system of pennies laid out either verso or recto at the base of each ailing clock signifies its movement having been sped up or slowed down during its last treatment. Once taken apart and put back together (often without the aid of recorded schematics), a diagnosis is made as to the cause of the problem. It’s painstaking, addling, trial-and-error work, but what’s even more addling is the way Lewis managed to pass on this dying craft to his children and sons-in-law.

Lewis, a master clockmaker whose father was a telegrapher with the railway, learned the basics of clock movements as a childhood interest, later going on to earn certification in clockmaking and repair at school in Winter Park. After working for years as a diesel engine technician, Lewis picked the skill back up during his first years of retirement, later managing to interest his son, Tom, Jr., his daughters, Debbie and Jacqui, and their respective husbands, Ron Riggs and Roy Gress, in the fascinating world of clocks, training them himself in his spare time.

While Jacqui and Roy own their own successful clock shop, Thee Clockmaker Shoppe in Mt. Dora, Tom, Jr., Debbie and Ron all work with Lewis at Riggs’ shop in Cocoa Beach. People began bringing in clocks as soon as Time & Treasures opened just a few months ago, and the response from the local community — both owners of newer clocks and those with delicate family heirlooms — has been encouraging, if not staggering in its enthusiasm.

All throughout the showroom are examples of their work, patients waiting in the wings and newer models for sale — including rhythm clocks, day clocks, and whimsical artistic models — as well as antiques like Black Forest cuckoos, pendulums, mantles, parlors, grandfathers, art decos, Occidentals, Westminster chimers, and old porcelain French and German varieties from the 18th and 19th centuries, all restored lovingly by the Time & Treasures team to their former, polished glory.

Two particularly interesting specimens here are original Eli Terry clocks. Terry, whose pupils and assistants were none other than Seth Thomas and Sials Hoadley, was the first craftsman to mass produce his creations (not Henry Ford as many assume), and he obtained his patent nearly 100 years before Ford secured one for the automobile. Terry’s weight-driven wooden clock movements were first developed in the late 1700s. Sitting on the shelf of some rustic’s cabin, the movement would operate with the help of a rock, acting as the weight, tied to the end of a string. The wooden gears were left exposed with nothing but a basic dial and hands to mark the hours. These clocks were later taken to furniture makers and put in long cases, the first of what we now call grandfather clocks.

Grandfathers are a favorite clock to work on here, as it puts all of their skills to the test, and thus provides the most satisfying rewards. They require near perfect balancing and leveling to run properly; minute, exacting tasks that demand intensely patient and undivided attention. If the minutes are even slightly off — as with any clock — it is, as they say, “back to the drawing board,” and many go through several stages of dismantling and reassembling before being sent home.

As for actually making clocks — that is, fashioning of them from the ground up — Lewis and Riggs say, rather contentedly, that they simply don’t have the time.

Time & Treasures, clockmakers, clock repair service and purveyors of clocks and music boxes, is located at 1980 N. Atlantic Avenue, Suite 110, on the bottom floor of the Cape Royal Building in Cocoa Beach. They offer expert clock repair with a 1-year guarantee and free estimates. They even pick up and deliver at no extra charge. The shop also offers unique gifts, harmonic bells, candles, music and jewelry boxes, and water globes of all shapes and sizes. Call 406-1772 for more information.

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Angela LoPresti St. Amant couldn’t have conceived of a better logo for her Melbourne art gallery.

But more importantly, those two twisted forms, distilled to their structural essence, are the totem for a style of art created and coined by St. Amant in 2005. Defined as a mode through which common figures are engineered into skewed, mulit-dimensional geometrical shapes, LoPressionism (derived in part from St. Amant’s maiden name), blends two antithetical forces into a cohesive, harmonious whole.

Born out of St. Amant’s love of realism’s focused approach and the freedom of exploration abstraction offers, LoPressionism Fine Art Gallery in historic downtown Melbourne also happens to be the physical manifestation of both her innate artistic gifts and her passion for organizational management. After earning her Bachelors degree in Fine Art, St. Amant took a break from her artistic pursuits in favor of the then-flourishing computer industry. While finding that she was well-suited to the demands of the technical field, going on to earn her Masters degree in Computer Resource and Information Management, St. Amant never lost her love of fine art and made it a point to visit galleries and speak with gallery owners wherever her professional travels took her.

Citing her 40th birthday as the turning point in her career, St. Amant set out to create a showcase for her two passions that would provide a greater sense of meaning while benefitting others. “It seems that my logical left brain has constantly battled for control with my creative right brain,” she says. “Instead of spending my life trying to decide which of the two paths was best for me, I finally decided to quit listening to everyone who said that I needed to focus in one direction.” Her dream, the result of that inner conflict, came to fruition in October of 2005, when she opened the metropolitan-modelled LoPressionism Gallery as a repository for some of the most intriguing art found locally and worldwide.
With the help of Gallery Manager Bianca Blottie and Gallery Consultant Liz DeSerio, St. Amant has gathered a stellar collection of pieces that are as broad-ranging in genre as they are in origin. Meeting LoPressionism’s discerning criteria are local artists like Cat Wicks, Vera Sattler, Russ Taylor, Barbara Osmundsen, Baxter Rains, Judith Copeland, and Nancy Dillen, all of whom are bolstered by a host of California-based artists and others from Greece, Mexico, and France. Three featured artists in particular caught our eye: Henry Asencio (whose “Beholding” graces this month’s cover), Heather Everett, and the hyper-realist Eric Christensen.
By “pushing” watercolor paint to its absolute limits, Wine Country artist Eric Christensen has invented a new way to paint wine art with this traditional medium. Using non-standard watercolor paper and employing a dry-brush technique, he starts out with thin washes then builds meticulously to over 30 subsequent layers of paint. Christensen began painting professionally in 1992, and has since enjoyed success and a growing reputation as a celebrated and unique still-life artist, the only known artist capable of hyperrealism through the use of standard watercolor paint. Self-taught, he invented a the aforementioned approach that allows him to create images of vibrant color that go beyond the look and depth of a high quality photograph. Once he realized that he could concentrate his passion for painting into a career, Christensen opened his own Art Gallery in Yountville, California, a small picturesque town in the heart of the Napa Valley. This venture proved very successful, netting Christensen exposure in national magazines and newspapers and a national television spot on “Wine Country Living.” As he puts it, “Life is hard enough as it is, so I try to paint the things that make me happy. Through my subject matter and all of its nuances and detail I want to convey all the complexities, colors and creativity of miracles that life gives to us on a daily basis.”

Heather Everett has been painting professionally since 1998. She began exhibiting her work in the Miami Beach area and Paris before moving to Satellite Beach in 2003, when she introduced herself and her work to the South Brevard community at various art festivals. Since then, her popularity has grown apace, spurring her to open the Heather Everett Studio in 2005. She’s since continued to expand her artistic horizons, to exhibit her works, and to teach both oils and acrylics for adults and children. Everett is currently teaching art to children at the Indian Harbour Montessori school and at the Satellite Beach Community Center. Her abstractly stylized landscapes set her apart from the average tropical-scene painter with their use of metallics (a thick application of acrylic paint and a masking technique), which render common landscapes with the brilliant hues and dancing forms that have become her signature style, something she calls “radically simplified chromatic abstraction.”
If any one artist embodies LoPressionism’s aesthetic, it’s San Jose, California artist Henry Asencio. Whether you call his work “Abstract Expressionism” or “Abstract Realism,” Asencio can’t be pigeonholed by style or semantics. His open brushwork, sweeping color, use of texture and precise drawing skills have resulted in a body of work that has earned him international accolades. In 1996, Asencio was sponsored by art supply company Thayer and Chandler, which resulted in exposure in exhibitions as far as Germany and Paris. In 1998, Asencio’s work was recognized in an art competition in Amsterdam. Earning the prestige of being a first time artist dually awarded with gold and silver medals in two separate divisions, he was acknowledged for self portraiture in oils and work in acrylic medium. Asencio graduated with honors from the San Francisco Art Academy in 1999 and was a chosen finalist in an Artist’s Magazine competition that same year, again for his work in portraiture.
Although he earned a living as a portrait artist early in his career, today Asencio says he’s “more concerned with creating a mood and pushing the aesthetic rather than achieving a true likeness as the ultimate end.” Avant-garde in execution, his work blends the classical ideals of figurative painting with the unique, contemporary style for which he’s so revered. Merging introspection and visual spectacle, Asencio’s personal investigations of feminity, spirituality and abstraction possess the power to transform today’s ideals of elegance and contemporary sensuality.
Newer works by artists Robin Linsmier, Rick LaClaire, Mary Ellen McLaughlin, Denette Schweikert, and Erich Padilla are featured in LoPressionism’s “Fusion” show, which will run through March 20th. Opening January 30th, “Fusion,” in keeping with LoPressionism’s aim, will merge disparate genres and disciplines into a synthesized entity. Also in keeping with LoPressionism’s ethos, a portion of the proceeds from the event will benefit the Brevard Business Leadership Network. St. Amant routinely supports philanthropic causes by hosting many fundraiser gallery receptions that coincide with chosen artists’ subject matter.
“I’ve never felt so internally satisfied, and that feeling is only intensified when I see that my own selfish desires are helping others, too,” she explains. Ever active in the art community, both locally and internationally, St. Amant proves through LoPressionism that art can cross many perceived boundaries, all while fostering the idea that in division there is an inherent, if unseen unity.
And in that unity, beauty.
LoPressionism Fine Art Gallery is located (now under the same roof as the Christmas Cottage) at 1002 E. New Haven Avenue in historic downtown Melbourne. Hours are Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. “Fusion” opens January 30th and runs through March 20th, with the opening reception held from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. For more information, contact LoPressionism at (321) 722-6000 or 888-581-ARTS, or visit: www.lopressionism.com to view their mission statement and stunning online gallery.

If you follow willful adolescent logic, he really shouldn’t be there. He should be out with his gang of friends, who at that particular moment were most likely wandering through Brooklyn or Queens looking for some hell sorely in need of raising. But for Bailey, this palpable painting of a horse auction holds his attention with a more immediate sense of life than the reality found out on the streets.

The title of the painting and the name of its creator are forgotten now, but in a way that’s immaterial. For the sensations it triggered still resound in Bailey’s mind today, some 40 years later. “You could hear the sound of the crowd when you looked at it,” he says, recalling the powerful image. “You could smell the horse sh*t.”

Even before that day though, Bailey found himself drawn to the visual arts. His mother, an art major, had a small photography studio in the basement and hand-tinted many wedding photos with a toddling Bailey on her knee. He remembers his grandmother giving him a paint set one year which kept him busy down in the basement during the evenings. During the day, he was outside with his leather-jacketed pals playing hockey or jumping subway turnstiles to seek adventure in the city. “I was a closet painter,” he says. “They didn’t know till much later what I did in my spare time.”

On Wednesdays, back in those days, the Met was free, and Bailey would go there religiously to bask for hours in the glory of the French impressionists and salon painters he still counts as favorite inspirations. “I liked Van Gogh, of course, but I loved all of it,” he tells me. “The art that really struck me though were those French painters who achieved the greatest perfection of form and realism without the use of photography.”

In imitation of his idols, Bailey began painting still lives and the everyday objects he saw in Manhattan.  After working for a short time as an undertaker, he became a New York City police officer. Harlem was his beat. “I saw many miracles during my time there,” he remembers. “I’d go home and attempt to capture them.”

After retiring early due to an injury, Bailey, now married with children, turned to carpentry and gardening to hasten his recovery, though still painting on the side. It was during this period that he got involved with the Huntington Art League on Long Island, making repairs on the building in exchange for tuition. Hitherto, Bailey had worked mainly with oils, but under the tutelage of some teachers he still remembers fondly, he tried his hand at watercolors.

“I was always covered in paint when my wife and I first met,” he says. “I switched to watercolors partly because of my her — she was getting tired of the mess — but also because I developed an allergic reaction to linseed oil, which every oil painter relies on.” While odorless varieties of the solvent exist now, the very memory of the scent makes Bailey cringe.

Then, as now, in many artistic circles, watercolorists were derided as hobbyists, old, Victorian women who daubed at their easels during their seaside holidays. But with his keen eye, innate skill and solid background in oil painting, Bailey eschewed the suggested outlines and muted hues of traditional watercolors in favor of strong lines and bright colors.

Watercolor is wrongly assumed to be more forgiving a discipline than oil painting, but in fact it’s a far harder beast to tame — at least according to Bailey’s high standards. “I preferred making harder edges,” he tells me, “and I like having more control over my subject.” By adapting methods learned in his youth, Bailey won early acclaim for the brightness, delicate transparency and tangibility of his work.

Moving to Brevard in the late ’80s for the sake of his daughters’ education, Bailey found himself drawn to the brilliant greens of tropical foliage. Though he started a series of abstracts, he soon turned his attention to wildlife and the landscapes he saw while fishing and taking photos out on the river. “We had a big blue heron that would always hang out in our backyard in Satellite Beach. He had a broken leg and I’d go out and feed him every day.” That heron became the first of his popular wildlife subjects.

But Bailey’s most impressive paintings are those of the verdure — burnished sea grape leaves, explosive birds of paradise, and almost opalescent ripening mangoes. As our interview comes draws to a close in the studio of his Melbourne Beach home, I notice a current piece nearing completion on his large desk. It’s a bowl of reddish green mangoes in a cut crystal bowl atop a delicately laced tablecloth.

It’s this painting that best captures both the mechanics of his artwork and the spirit of his inspiring life.   I’m stunned by the skill with he rendered the reflections of the fruit against the refracted angles of the bowl. Until then, I’d always thought of painting as an accretive process, adding layer upon layer until a shape comes together. As Bailey explains, it’s more a reductive process.

Rather than laboring over each individual angle and shadow of glass, Bailey paints what’s behind the crystal, and soon the intricate angles of the bowl begin to take shape as if coaxed from the nothingness of the white canvas.

It’s a good way of approaching Bailey’s work in general, or indeed that of any artist. By filling in what’s behind the present moment, the boy and the man coalesce into an intriguing whole.

Peter Bailey is well-known in the local and statewide art circuits. Look for his work at upcoming festivals.    View his works online at www.pcbaileyartstore.com, or call (321) 674-9738 to set up an appointment.

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I’m loathe to even call it “collecting” though, because of the nerdy, concerted searching the practice implies. We don’t spend hours scouring the internet for rare pieces and don’t subscribe to the Hallmark racket of amassing numbered, limited edition pieces. What we’ve done, rather, is something more organic, starting with some forgotten, dusty decorations appropriated from my mother’s utility closet and adding things found here and there during our travels.

Adhering to a loose stipulation that each be handmade (preferably from wood), we’ve picked up a pair of tiny clogs from France and a miniature viking from Iceland. The rest, along with select pieces culled from our childhood collection, were given to us by retired relatives who found them during their many voyages. There’s a Belleek bell from Ireland; a burnoosed figurine from Morocco; a Pinocchio from Italy; some embroidered Danish hearts, and many more from countries where craftsmen, though becoming more scarce, are still appreciated for carrying on a dying tradition.

So what we’ve amassed then, isn’t so much a collection of ornaments as an accumulation of stories each tells. Their tales are remembered and relayed (often with some creative embellishment) when they’re taken from the box and hooked to the tree.

Now that we have two daughters, this family tradition has taken on new life, and our latest addition, a small profile of Santa Claus made by Cocoa Beach woodcarver Bob Graves, tells my favorite story of all.

As it goes on the tree this year, I’ll describe to my daughters the odd sensation I felt upon first meeting Bob and his wife Peggy in their home, the sensation that I’d met them somewhere before. Indeed, the fact that both are Brooklyn-bred Irish Americans, with that warm affability and wry sense of humor so particular to their kind, quickly endeared them to my heart and put me in mind of so many of my own relatives who’ve long since passed.

I’ll tell my daughters how I was steered toward Bob through a friend at the library who remembered his carvings when they were on display there two years ago. And I’ll tell them how soft-spoken and modest he was as he downplayed his impressive skill, and how a proud Peggy coaxed details out of him about each piece and the memories they conjured.

They’ll hear that Bob fell into the craft somewhat by accident himself, when he was asked by a sculptor to carve a leaf with a mallet and hammer on a sculpture he was helping install back in New York over 20 years ago. Soon after, using only knives, Bob made some of his first carvings with the aid of books and simple trial and error. When he retired and moved to the area in 1989, Bob used the extra time to hone his skill, mastering minutiae like individual teeth for his animals, the contours of their muscles in motion, and the texture and grain of their fur.

I’ll describe the museum-quality pieces I saw on display throughout their home — sleekly-carved cheetahs atop a felled tree, filigreed spoons, a Roman centurion atop his steed, two incredibly detailed grizzlies battling in a forest scene, a storybook dragon, egrets, pelicans, a sublime Christ on the cross — and the hoard of pieces unearthed from his cluttered workshop. It was from a box full of ornaments that the Santa Claus was found, nestled beneath a steadfast soldier, a ballerina, a gaggle of fanciful gnomes, and a colorful nutcracker.

But I’ll be sure to explain to them that Bob is in no way just a carver of ornaments, despite his studio’s resemblance to Santa’s workshop. I’ll tell them about the wonderful carousel in their guest room, the intricate cuckoo clock hanging in their bedroom, and the frog orchestra — all of which come to life through an ingenious, complex system of wires, springs and gears.

Turning the frog bandstand over reveals, in fact, a piece of art within an already astounding carving. Using meticulous care, patient tenacity and logic of movement, Bob struggled over how to get one frog’s arm to bow a cello in a sideways motion, sticking with it till the end where others would have given it up as a insoluble endeavor. As I describe these things to my daughters, I’m sure I’ll see their eyes glow in wonder. Bob might even take on an almost magical form in their young minds. And it is almost magic, the way he can see, for instance, the latent form of an old, bearded sage hidden in a rough chunk of driftwood.

But when I fasten a hook to Bob’s Santa Claus this year, I’ll remind my daughters that he’s a real man I met, and the ornament was made with his hands, not by a machine churning out thousands from plastic molds.

They’ll learn that Bob Graves’ story is the story of the craftsman, unremarkable in its details and the hours of solitary work, but beautifully eloquent in the creations that will live generations after him.

It’s a story I’ll never tire of telling them as they grow older. And I know it’s one they’ll be telling their children in years to come.

Bob Graves is part of the Space Coast Woodcarvers Club, which meets every Thursday from 8 a.m. to 12 Noon. His work will be on display along with those of 75 other members and carvers for the Space Coast Woodcarvers Annual Show on January 31st at the Eau Gallie Civic Center (1551 Highland Ave.; Melbourne) from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Call (321) 453-6862 for more details.

It’s a wonderfully Chaplinesque moment on many levels, and while the scene may very well have been lifted from one of his earlier films, it doesn’t diminish the resonance of an act which has surely been played out since time immemorial.

It seems we all have an innate desire to beautify our surroundings and breach the confining and often stultifying structures we surround ourselves with. A few simple lines drawn with a nub of chalk can sometimes do more toward breaking down barriers and opening up possibilities than any number of sledgehammers or pneumatic drills. Local artist Pat Goodnough knew as much when she painted a trompe l’oeil archway affording a view of the beach on the wall over her mother’s armoire.

Pat had just moved here and into her mother’s mobile home condominium from Bristol, CT to care for her during an illness. Aiming to “spruce up” the drab, confining space, Pat found herself painting nearly everything within (including inventive portholes opening up to mirage-like seascapes), even venturing outdoors to color the meter and electrical conduits and adorning the base of the nearby telephone pole with brilliant blades of tall grass. That was back in 1994, and Pat has been painting ever since, most recently turning her hand to still life studies, landscapes, and wildlife portraits.

But she got her real start back in Connecticut, where she learned the rudiments of painting in high school. “I’d always drawn since I was a kid,” she says. “That helped me, starting from there. I learned later that people who know how to paint don’t necessarily know how to draw.”

Later becoming a journeyman machinist, Pat fed her hobby during her free time, gaining invaluable experience on how different paints and colors behave in relation to one another. And it was during this time that her drawing skills dovetailed with mathematics to give her paintings the impeccable sense of perspective they have. It’s hard, in fact, to even notice how impeccable they are, so unnoticeably do they mimic three dimensional life without the handy, scaled contrivances other painters often employ.

Upon her relocation to Florida, Pat found work with Brevard Ornamentals in Rockledge, where she gave life and color to many statues and ceramic accoutrements, using special  techniques to help them withstand the elements and retain their new-found vibrancy. Many of these pieces were commissioned works, and helped add the important skill of empathy to her cache of natural talents.

As an artist, Pat stands out from the crowd for her effortless affability, something friends, neighbors and colleagues feel comes out in each painting she creates. Indeed, many of her pieces began as gifts to friends and several are inspired by personal totems of each recipient.

Impressed by a New York City fireman friend’s photo of himself emerging from a building, Pat is currently rendering it larger in black and white paint, among the first of her forays into colorless territory. Before that, she’d completed a sepia and cream painting of the Trinity for another acquaintance. While she finds it hard to work in monochrome for long periods of time, she always finds solace in going back to other more colorful pieces for a spell before resuming work with fresh eyes.

Colors — those rich tones found in birds’ plumage and explosive sunsets — play an important role in many of Pat’s paintings, and one can see the varied works of the legendary Highwaymen nudging their way into many of her brilliantly-hued tropical landscapes. Regardless of her subject, she revels each time she completes one in the knowledge that she’s learned something new about her craft.

Another thing that sets Pat’s ready-framed work apart is their manageable size, versatility, and affordability. That they add beauty and fresh dimension to otherwise confining spaces is a simply wonderful bonus.

Contact Pat Goodnough at (321) 543-8541 to make an appointment to see her collection of artwork and portfolio or to commission a piece.

But long before Gene Wilder turned him into an inept, wild-maned hack, he’d been portrayed in film and knock-off literature as an malevolent megalomaniac, whose quest for godhood eclipsed any responsibility for his creation. Adding insult to injury, that creation went on to overshadow its namesake, and by the 1930s poor Victor’s complex persona had been wholly subsumed by a flat-pated ghoul with two bolts sprouting from his neck.

When 19-year-old Mary Shelley first conceived of Victor back in 1817, she imagined a much gentler man, who while having something of the Faust about him, was simply a tragic victim of his own brilliance and naive ambition. His creation (unnamed in the novel, but referred to simply as “the creature”) gave the original story much of its dramatic movement and captured the public’s terrified imagination, but the real key to “Frankenstein; or, The Modern  Prometheus” lies within Victor’s tortured soul.

Melbourne Beach artist Octavio Diaz isn’t exactly what you’d call a tortured soul, but his mind, by his own admission, is certainly skewed. And like Victor Frankenstein, he creates vibrant, sometimes unsettling life from scraps of dead material.

Born in Cuba and raised in Miami, Diaz first began drawing in junior high when he discovered Zap Comix and the artwork of Robert Crumb. “I started with pen and ink, and learned by imitating the styles I saw,” he says. “I imitated. Badly.”

From there he developed his own style, informed by Cubism and rigid, geometric shapes. A move to Melbourne Beach in 1987 injected another strong influence: Surfing. “Around that time I realized I could make a living with my art,” he tells me. “Soon my work went in a more commercial direction. ”

Diaz soon found work designing t-shirts for renowned Hawaii-based surfboard manufacturers Town & Country. In keeping with the era’s ethos, many of those designs incorporated garish strokes of color and “New Wave” forms, and some found their way onto Martin Potter’s boards as logos and fanciful graphics.

During this time, Diaz also juggled work with Florida Today, where as a staff artist he contributed airbrushed designs to compliment articles on a variety of subjects. Mastering Photoshop in 1993, he began to develop his “digital collage” style, blending disparate photographic components to create some inventively humorous images.

“It began subconsciously,” he remembers. “I’d always been drawing caricatures with pencil. It just seemed natural to carry them over into Photoshop, and that made them come out even stronger.” That style, now inextricably linked with his name, is marked by caricatures of outcasts, freaks, and general eccentrics whose exaggerated features fairly jump off the page.

Last year, after staff restructuring at the paper, Diaz was let go, but turned disappointment into opportunity. “I realized I’d be limited in my options if I continued working solely for papers,” he muses. “They tend to like singular styles and mine veer pretty far from the norm.”

In addition to working as a graphic artist for the Daytona Beach News Journal, Diaz has branched out into freelance design work, having created images for the likes of Forbes, 2.0, PC Magazine, Computer Life, Sports Illustrated, McGraw-Hill, and Fortune Small Business. His ingenious combinations of scanned images, photos and geometric shapes might seem like odd choices for such relatively conservative publications, but their strange appeal helps keep each issue’s content fresh and current.

Many of the photos he employs are taken during his daily travels, with interesting textures such as wrinkled vinyl, scuffed leather, and stippled surfaces being the most sought after subjects. Facial features are culled from Diaz’s large catalogue of photos and his own scanned hands figure into many of the pieces.

Although much of Diaz’s freelance work depicts high-strung people at odds with technology, his most popular creations are the result of personal experiments. The outrageous “General Tequila,” based on a real personage who, similarly attired, dispenses tequila shots at local conventions is one of Diaz’s favorites, along with “Surf Devil,” the embodiment of an unchecked passion for waves.

Diaz is currently at work on a series of famous rock stars imagined in their childhood. A wraithlike Marilyn Manson exhibiting the first signs of aberration has recently been completed and a gloomy Trent Reznor is almost finished. If Diaz sees the project through, there’s a distinct danger of his  sharing poor Victor Frankenstein’s fate as a misunderstood madman. But fret not; With creations as unique and jarring as these, his name is sure to live on.

View Octavio Diaz’s online portfolios at these sites: www.theispot.com/artist/odiaz; www.newspagedesigner.com, and http://octaviodiaz.blogspot.com

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That’s what first-time visitors to Rockledge Design Studios usually say when they walk inside. It’s strange enough that the bustling factory exists at the bend of a nondescript industrial cul-de-sac, but what’s even stranger is the way it overcame seemingly insuperable obstacles to become one of the premier design and metal fabrication firms in Florida, if not the country.

Not, as one would rightly assume, based in Rockledge, Cocoa’s innovative Rockledge Design Studios is found down a small, winding road marked by a few battered quonset huts and fenced-off plots of boats and cars in various states of disrepair, its only indicator the RDS logo hanging outside the windowless facade.

Inside, it’s clear something incredible is afoot. Next to a wall adorned with photographs of metal structures, sculptural accessories and custom-made furniture is a breathtaking 6-foot-high fish-shaped rocking chair balancing on its tail, which is emblazoned with brushed and textured scales. Made of solid, marine-grade aluminum, the chair was designed by in-house designer Fred Garbotz who began RDS in a different guise with his wife Joanne in the mid-’90s.

But as impressive as it is, the fish chair — one of Garbotz’s early designs — is more a symbol of how far RDS has come since its founding.

RDS didn’t truly come into it’s own until 1996, when Fred and Joanne enlisted the help of their son, Patrick Pacifico, then based in Chicago. Up to that point, the RDS vision was driven solely by Fred, who was unable to keep up with the demand for his pieces which were then only available through the local retail art market.

With Fred in control of the creative end of things, Joanne handling all the finances, and Patrick, known for his engineering and technical skills, RDS began fostering working relationships with designers and artists across the country, effectively broadening the variety of their creations and their scope of availability.

Chicagoan Christopher Royal was one of the first artists to collaborate with RDS, and his inventive miniature chairs and accoutrements proved so popular that the company added 15 more artists to their design roster. Taking designers’ sketches and ideas and turning them in to three-dimensional sculptures, RDS catered to local art lovers (then, not just a strata of visitors from metropolitan areas) who had plenty of money to spend. Business boomed, and RDS collaborations could be found in 150 galleries nationwide. Through a German distribution center, their works appeared in art shows and galleries across much of Europe.

But by 2000, a looming recession saw the huge potential market dwindle considerably. They weathered the sharp economic downturn precipitated by the events of 9/11 through what Patrick unabashedly describes as a mixture of stubbornness and ignorance.

“After 9/11, business tanked 100%,” Patrick tells me, in an office cluttered with blueprints, prototypes and photos of RDS creations. “I think anyone else would have given up. People just didn’t have that stash of disposable income anymore.”

His diligence paid off when he tapped into the architectural design and general fabrication market, which then (as now), was rife with opportunities as Brevard expanded and developed apace. So RDS diversified, fashioning custom architectural complements like gates and railings. “We were asked to do an entry gate for a home,” Patrick remembers. “Other companies probably would’ve turned it down — ‘No, we don’t do that.’ But work is work.”

The decision proved wise. Today, an enormous factory employing over 20 highly-skilled fabricators and metal workers, RDS is the company contractors, homeowners, builders, and hotels and country clubs seek out when they’re in need of high-quality architectural elements.

From conception and building to the finishing process and shipping, RDS is a one-top shop for metal fabrication. Under its vaulted roof is a fully-equipped machine shop, welding and grinding stations, and a powder coating room.

But in keeping with their roots, the people at RDS give each of their products unique creative flourishes. For all their seeming functionality, each element — whether a flowing spiral staircase or a window grating — bears that unmistakeable RDS stamp, turning once stultifying accoutrements into innovative complements, and eye-catchers in and of themselves.

Simultaneously acting in accord with their surroundings and as distinct pieces of fine craftsmanship, you can imagine them being preserved for their individual beauty before future demolitions of the structures their attached to.

Yet while utilitarian ornamental work accounts for something like 80% of their business, RDS continue their collaborative work with artists like Keith Mastropaolo, Henry Lund, Louise Matlock, Fred Babb, and the renowned Frits van Eeden, who designed a number of striking equine sculptures. Works range from fanciful benches, tables, wine racks and lamps to stools, bar tops, bowls, kinetic sculptures, clocks, and magazine stands.

Locals may have admired their work with the Cocoa Beach Surf Company without even realizing it. That impressive, conical Hot Tuna marquee piercing the second floor of their showroom? That sleekly curved and inventively lit pediment above the Shark Pit bar? All made with the help of the RDS design team.

Artists are drawn to work with the RDS team by the openness of the place — both physically and aesthetically. “Here, an artist can do things they never thought they’d be able to do,” Patrick says. “Either they don’t have enough space or money to see their ideas come together. We help their ideas become realities because we feed off creativity.”

Visit Rockledge Design Studios online at: www.rockledgedesign.com. RDS welcomes custom furniture, sculptural and architectural commissions. Call (321) 631-0121 for more information.

The argument goes that fine art is inherently more profound in its message, which is usually gleaned after deep reflection and informed criticism. Decorative art, on the other hand, speaks to the more immediate senses, and is therefore more populist in its appeal.

Most people simply chalk their opposition up to basic functionality. But modern art has become so inclusive and adaptable over the last century that even that point of widely-accepted divergence has now become a ramshackle wall sorely in need of dismantling.

Just walk through an IKEA and you’ll see the inroads made in interior design, once exclusively the indulgence of the well-heeled. Admire the slender contour of your iPod and you’ll realize even more how much that line’s been blurred. After all, what is yesterday’s cup but today’s treasured chalice? Who knows, your rusty Buick could end up in the Louvre come 2267.

The convergence of these two disciplines is even more evident in local beachside art, where many creations serve the dual purpose of being both thought-provoking and going well with the geraniums. Cocoa Beach artist Sheri Stewart takes the relationship even further by creating pieces that are as free from guile and ulterior motive as herself, and to categorize her work as either fine or decorative art does them an injustice.

Take one of her most striking paintings, the whimsically-titled “School’s Out,” which depicts a flutter of turquoise fish wending through a tuft of sinuous seaweed. It’s decorative enough, with its bright colors and boldly outlined forms reminiscent of Tiffany stained glass, and its tasteful composition alone puts it in the fine art category. A search for the message behind it reveals something so innocent that any criticism is rendered downright churlish. For by her own admission, Stewart’s aim is to elicit nothing more than a smile.

Her love of whimsy and light-hearted playfulness can be traced back to her Chicago childhood, when dreams of being an animator for Disney spurred her to study illustration in earnest. Later earning her teaching credentials, Stewart worked as a substitute art teacher and opened a day care service in her home after her first daughter was born, with one day being set aside for various art projects. Through a boutique she opened after the birth of her son, she fashioned hand-painted signs and apparel, and made a name for herself on the Illinois craft show circuit, all the while inspiring her children to create. “All of my own children are very creative,” she says. “It’s always been important to me to instill in them an appreciation for the arts.”

Drawn by the vibrancy of beachside life and the bright colors of the coast, Stewart moved to the Outer Banks in the late ’90s where she honed her highly-lauded mosaic making skills. But it was the unique setting and lively art scene of Cocoa Beach that inspired her to set down roots here for good in 2005. This, as she puts it, feels finally like home.

And her home away from home, her own Bali Studios, opened in January 2008, with its broad view of her beloved beach and the ocean, is the bright embodiment of her artistic soul, equally fed by solitary creation and her devotion to teaching. “I love it here,” she says, surrounded by colorfully-painted work tables, paintings, mosaics, stacks of tiles, and all the tools of her trade. Here she teaches private classes to both adults and children, stressing the need for freedom for creativity to fully bloom. And it’s a wonderfully inspiring environment, decorated with a wide range of her paintings and intricate mosaics. “This is what’s in my head made real,” she tells me. Indeed, the studio itself could be considered a work of art.

One recent student, a young girl, came to Stewart for instruction on how to draw cats and dogs. “I asked her if she wanted to work on other things like trees,” Stewart recalls. “And she said, ‘No. Just cats and dogs,’ and that’s totally fine. I work with my students to help them do what they want and try not to force them down a certain path. Art is all about doing what you want to do.” Classes consist of a wide range of studies and disciplines, including painting, illustration, and weaving, as well as the craft that’s closest to her heart, creating cracked tile mosaics.

Wedding everyday functionality with the kind of timeless beauty the ancient Romans and Minoans chose to adorn their homes and temples with, Stewart’s mosaics span the supposed gap between fine and decorative art effortlessly. A look through her portfolio of the furniture, pools, walls, and rooms she’s adorned shows a uncanny skill in coupling interior design with an understanding of her customers’ individuality. A good example of the personal touch she gives is her incorporation of each family member’s footprints on a tiled shower floor.

“A lot of the pieces I make come from what I’d want in my own place,” she reveals. “I like to feel like I’m truly coming home. And I feel that your home should be a place where you want to play and forget whatever else you do outside. I like to arrive and be in a crazy, fun, worry-free world.” As such, Stewart’s colorfully fanciful world is populated with birds, hawksbill turtles (as in her popular “Kelp Kruiser” painting), mermaids, and all manner of sea life emblazoned with the deep blue and green hues of their glittering realm.

And while water figures heavily in her work, one of her most impressive mosaics, which happens to grace a local pool, is a stylized flaming sun, which as she says “popped” once all the pieces came together and the surrounding black aggregate was completed. Taking numerous pieces of cracked tile, she works intently as if assembling an enormous puzzle, the form of which she first sketches out on her chosen surface, which could be anything from a long hallway, a bathroom, a patio, a vanity, or a set of bar stools.

Yet a full appreciation of Stewart’s work almost requires seeing them in the flesh. Whether they’re mosaics or paintings, each shows an appreciation for texture and dimension. And more importantly, each conveys what could well be the hidden commonality between fine and decorative art, and perhaps one of the hardest to relate: Honesty.

Sheri Stewart’s Bali Studios, an oceanfront artist’s teaching studio for kids and adults, is located at 1980 N. Atlantic Ave., Ste. 507 in Cocoa Beach. Here you can create your own memories through art classes for all ages — including painting, mosaic, pastels, tie dye, and much more. Call ahead at (321) 720-2215 to plan your own custom class, to view her artwork, or for information on commissioning custom work for your home or business. See her work in the flesh on Friday, October 24th at Juice N’ Java Cafe (75 N. Orlando Ave.; Cocoa Beach; 784-4044). They’ll be hosting a showing of her work, including mosaics, decorated furniture, paintings (as well as Holiday greeting cards and notecard-size prints of select paintings), and the introduction of her new socially-conscious t-shirt line. Check back with the Resident in coming months for details, or visit www.balistudios.com.

It seems every local artist counts the ocean as a major inspiration for their work, but I’ve yet to meet someone who’s as boundlessly passionate about water as Redwine. Even when it doesn’t come up in our conversation, it’s referenced tangentially or roiling and bubbling just below each uttered word. I bet if you were to cut him (accidentally, of course), he’d bleed brine.

Where other fisherman live begrudgingly for the weekend or a surreptitious sick day, Redwine’s life revolves around the water on a daily basis. You get the sense that for him, being on the water is the norm, and time spent on solid ground is a rather pesky concession. Even his Merritt Island home, while decked out with all the traditional landlubbing trappings, gives the impression of a way station, a kind of intermittent headquarters for frequent river excursions.

For Redwine, his home, set back in a nondescript cul-de-sac, is the gateway into another world. “When I park my car in the driveway and go through the door,” he tells me, “I enter another world. And when I come home on Fridays and go through it, I never see the car again till Monday morning.”

I met Redwine here of a hazy morning and was immediately impressed with the openness of the place. While a few indications of his artistic talent hung on the wall, others, in various states of completion, were stacked unobtrusively in the corner. Despite their undeniable beauty and originality, I couldn’t help but be drawn to the scene outside, framed by the large windows and sliding glass doors in his living room. The Banana River in all it sublime glory, appropriately enough, is the focus of Redwine’s house. Leading me out onto the deck outside, past a large quiver of fishing rods, tropical foliage, recovered flotsam, and an easel bearing one of his latest pieces painted on a weathered slab of wood, he shows me his resplendent domain with the childlike pride and generosity of one who’s happiest sharing the one secret closest to his heart.

But if the water figures heavily in his life and work, it will always play second fiddle to his family. Fortunately for Redwine, both his wife, Cory, and son, Alden, share his passion in equal measure. “The core to everything here is my family,” he says. “We love being out here. Whether we’re fishing or just exploring, just being together is what it’s all about.”

That connectedness overflows into his compelling artwork, too. “This,” he says, indicating the river and the general outdoors with a sweep of his hand, “is what I’m inspired by. There’s always something to see out here. I’m always looking. Everything I see becomes a study or an idea for a painting.” One of his best pieces, aptly named “Voyeur,” hints at the reverence with which he treats his subjects and the intimate world they inhabit. With a tangle of mangrove roots and glistening river serving as a backdrop, it depicts a stylized snook and a white ibis eyeing each other patiently. Either one of them could be the titular observer, but I like to think that it’s the viewer himself who’s peeking in on a hidden scene so timeless, its bestowed with an almost holy mystique.

In keeping with that mystical air, “Voyesur’s” snook, like many of the other fish he paints, is emblazoned with a blend of Meso-American geometric motifs, their swirls and exaggerated borders vaguely akin to those carved on Mayan temple reliefs. Venturing this guess as to their source, I ask Redwine where his travels have taken him. Venezuela and Costa Rica are indeed favorite spots, and he avers that Mexican Day of the Dead folk art is a strong influence, but when he mentions having taken fishing trips to Alaska as well, these forms take on new dimensions of meaning.

Part Inuit, part Aztec (with even a dash of Maori thrown in), Redwine’s fish succeed in becoming something wholly transcendent — borderless totemic symbols of freedom and tightly-coiled power. “I get ideas from everywhere and try to incorporate them into each painting,” he offers. “But I don’t really want them to look like fish in the traditional way. I want to capture the feel of fish.” If that’s his bold aim, then he’s more than succeeded.

Other paintings of an arching mahi or rolling tarpon capture that essence of aquatic life — fishness, if you will — and each of his gilled subjects is simultaneously individualistic and representative of their class. What’s more, they’re not the cooki-cutter images of fish you’re used to seeing. By his own admission, the self-taught Redwine takes pains to obscure his images with layers of color and shadow, giving them added depth of movement. It’s as if he enjoys a personal connection with each of them, and like any true fisherman, he has an unbridled respect for them and their domain.

Though some of Redwine’s earliest memories are of doodling and painting with sets his mother purchased for him, it wasn’t until he became a professional charter boat mate in the area that his two passions converged. He’d often design t-shirts for captains and friends, and his innate talent with logos and lettering saw demand build apace, leading to his and Cory’s founding the Port Canaveral-based Boldwater Graphics, the undisputed leader in local marine graphic design.

But while his work with Boldwater is satisfying, it’s when he’s painting for himself that he’s most fulfilled. “When I’m here,” he says, in his home studio, “I can do the stuff I like. Graphic design is more focused on the final product. When you’re involved in it, you subject yourself to having to carry everything out to completion.” Taking me over to a work-in-progress, a swerving marlin, hanging above a box of homemade artificial flys, Redwine pauses meaningfully. “When I’m painting for myself, it’s hard for me to finish anything totally. I always see something else that can be added or taken away. I just find myself starting over again.” A planned showing of his work at Port Canaveral’s Rusty’s on August 8th, however, is his current, if temporary incentive.

And with the amount of extra years he’s racked up out on the water, time shouldn’t be much of an issue.

See a showing of Derek Redwine’s artwork Tuesday, August 8th at Rusty’s Seafood and Oyster Bar (628 Glen Cheek Dr., Port Canaveral). The exhibition which will feature newer and older Redwine works, live music, and wine and hors d’oeuvres. Contact Rusty’s at (321) 783-2033 for more details. Redwine himself is available through Boldwater Graphics (677 Dave Nisbet Dr., Suite 119; Port Canaveral; 868-5090) for custom work for both homes and vessels.