Posted on 6 Comments

Road Trip – Another Two Weeks in Paradise

There are several places I’ve been through the years that I can’t get out of my system. Castine, ME, Amsterdam, NL, Bruges, BE, and Key West, FL. I was lucky to be in the Keys in the early 80s, a little late to the party, Michael came many times in the 70s, I wish I would have seen it them. But even in the 80s, when we lived on Big Pine, KW was still pretty funky. And I still find some vestiges of that today. I love everything about it, the water, the sun, Old Town, the art, the people, all keep calling me back.

I’ve photographed pretty much everything in KW at least once and done paintings of some. But I still find something new each time. I love the weird and wonderful.

What I REALLY love is walking the Old Town neighborhoods and seeing the conch houses and the flowers and and gardens around them, the shadows from the bright sun and the interesting fences cut into different shapes.



On the way down I like to take the Card Sound Road and see if Alabama Jacks looks any different. It does not! However these days there are as many BMWs as there are bikes. One of my favorite stories about it, I’ve told many times, is about our crazy friend Daryl who lived in on a boat in a not so nice marina in Little Havana in Miami. We were going to Key West and on the way stopped at the Bar. There was a “no swearing” sign with a jar full of quarters. In his usual fashion Daryl’s language was peppered with four letter words. The waitress pointed at the sign with her other hand out. Daryl slapped a $20 in it and said “come back when I’ve used that up and I’ll give you another.”

Every year i walk up Olivia Street near the cemetery and see what new addition is on the directional sign there. It changes a little every year. I Love it! I take photos of directional signs all over the world but this one is my favorite of them all.

This years visit was Michaels kind of visit, more time sitting at the pool and reading. I’m trying to resist buying any more art right now, instead I bought books.



The book about No Name takes place in 1935 when the hurricane destroyed Flaglers railroad he was building through the Keys – we lived about 1/4 of a mile from No Name on Big Pine. I drove out to the end of the main road when the Ferry Terminal was. The island now has electric lines going out there, which only happened in 2013! But it’s still a place where people live that want to live on the edge. No way would I live there! There really has been little development on Big Pine in the past 30 years with the middle of the island still looking uninhabited with dirt roads to no where.

The second book is about a guy, Karl Tanzler, also known as Count Carl von Cosel, a radiologist in Key West, Florida, who developed an obsession for one of his patients, Elena Milagro Hoyos. Elena died from tuberculosis in 1931. With her parents’ permission von Cosel had an above ground mausoleum built for her. He visited the tomb every night and by 1933 he had taken the body home. Creepy!! The author is the husband of artist Helen Harrison, and co owner of Harrison Gallery, that I visit every year.

The third book is a collection of stories by people that lived in Key West during the 60s, 70s, and 80s, with all the wild, and beautiful things that went on then. Its written by the wife of a guy Michael worked for on Big Pine.

One day I spent the afternoon with artist friend Mike Rooney and his wife Annette, listening to Mike play at the Pineapple Pool.

This visit was full of art, I visited all the galleries, went to a street fair and saw friend Tommy with his beautiful wood working, attended a huge show with a painter, a metal worker, a wood sculptor, and a collection of art “after” Mario Sanchez at the Studios of Key West. I met a lady in a shop who told me about an opening for her husband at Salt Gallery so I attended that and met some more new people. Went to the opening of a show at Jag Gallery, by Lincoln Perry, Muralist, then went to hear him speak at the Studios of Key West.

Lincoln Perry



I painted pottery, started painting a couple watercolors, sat by the pool and on the beach, read a lot and rested.

These are some of my paintings of Key West I’ve done previously.

Key West Bait and Tackle
Blue Heaven SOLD
Key West Gate – Available
Cuban Food Truck – Available




The trip home was fun as well. We stopped at the Flea Market on Big Pine that has been going for over 40 years.
Then we visited the Design District and Wynwood in Miami.

We even got to see one of Buckys geodesic domes, quite an entrance to a parking garage.

Jeanie Taylor Folk Art Gallery in Sanford is well worth a trip if you are anywhere close. And the Downtown of Sanford has really taken off the past few years, very nice!

Then we spent the night with friends in Gainesville, also former gallery owners whose gallery was on Los Olas in Ft Lauderdale and had a wonderful evening talking shop and reminiscing, and enjoying their fabulous art collection. Then I dropped my friend off in Columbia and spent the next night with my niece.

Where to next? I found out about a clay workshop in Traverse City Michigan at the end of the month with an artist Michelle Tock York, who I’ve admired for years, and I am also fortunate to have two pieces of her work. I will be going off to that, not really the time I would pick to go to Michigan but what can you do!

Posted on 2 Comments

Road Trip Key West, flowers, and points north

Key West post Irma ….

There are a few empty shops on Duval, which you usually don’t see…there are some signs “closed for repairs from hurricane damage”….and a lot of the shade is gone… but Key West is every bit as beautiful as ever.

kw3

kw2

kw1

kw flower 15

My friend Deb met me there and we stayed at the Almond Tree Inn. Our room and the grounds were beautiful, and the location perfect. It’s a half block off of Duval on the quiet end of the street.

This year they started a free Duval Loop bus that circles every 15 minutes and we rode it twice a day. When ever I go to Key West I always want to walk all the streets in Old Town so being able to catch a ride back was great.

My favorite thing is to take photos of the architecture and flowers. One of these days I’ll do some paintings of some of my favorite spots.

kw sculpture 14

kw sculpture 1

kw house 6

kw flower9

kw flower 16

kw flower 10

kw flower 2

Chickens and roosters still abound.

kw rooster 1

We even went to Sunset at Mallory Square, the first time in 33 years I’ve done that.

kwwThe cat man is still there  (thank you youtube for the video) – don’t know if he is the same one from years ago but he if he is he’s crazier than ever!

kw sunset16

kw sunset 4

Ate lunch at Blue Heaven after Deb left. NO I did not eat this Key Lime Pie with the giant meringue – the folks sitting next to me at the bar did! You can eat with the chickens running around your feet outside or inside without at Blue Heaven.

pie .jpg

We found some fabulous artwork in the galleries and visited with some friends.

We ran into NC artist, musician, and friend Mike Rooney at Bo’s. He was teaching a painting workshop at Dog Tired Gallery the next day and getting ready for a show at Gallery on Greene later in the month, he’s also teaching at The Studios of Key West.

kw rooneyWe stopped to see boat builder, painter, wood worker, and all around artist and friend Tommy Avery (originally from Bridgeton) in his studio on Stock Island. This is one of his paintings of the Green Parrot.

kw tommy1

We had lunch with another friend who lives here, which made us feel like we really belonged in this slice of heaven.

After seeing paintings by David Scott Meier, the creator of the famous painting “Nice Hat”….

Nice Hat…we tracked him down in his studio on Simonton.

kw david
Turns out it was a fluke he was there since he is moving his studio up state to Deland, after being in KW for many years. We had a great conversation about his work, what he’s up to, where he’s been, and who he is currently studying with.

I didn’t meet her but was greatly inspired by paintings by Joan Becker. I had never seen her work before. LOVE it!!
tiki bar joan becker

Other work I liked were the totems by Key West Pottery potter and sculptor Adam Russell.

kw art3

Just for fun we went to see Randy Roberts at La Te Da. He put on a great show, (no lip syncing)  and at the end he sings in his own male voice. He was great.

kw late2

No we did not go to the Garden of Eden but like a town where you can pretty much do whatever you want as long as you are not hurting anyone else.

kw garden of eden

As epitomized in the official philosophy of Key West.
one human family
I don’t know why but I love directional signs (other signs too) and always have to take photos of them.

rachel

kw funky8

kw funky4

kw funky 19

kw funky 15

kw funky 2

kw funk7

The thing I noticed most that was different was the lack of shade, Irma took out a lot of the canopy, but the flowers are still beautiful!

kw flowers16

kw flower16

kw flower9

kw flower7

kw flower6

kw flower5

kw flower4

kw flower1
They now have two flamingos (I don’t know how to tell whether this is Rhett or Scarlett) at the Key West Butterfly & Nature Conservatory along with an amazing number of butterflies!

flam1.jpg

bf1

This guy was scooping up minnows to go fishing with.

kw beach 2

And as always the sunsets are Spectacular.

kw 15

I would have never thought to go to the  St. Augustine Alligator Farm but heard from my friend Judy that there is an amazing bird rookery there so had to stop to see it. I’ve gotten so many great bird photos this trip I may have to paint some, if I do I will post them in this blog. And by the way they have hundreds of alligators!!

 

 

al4

al3

al2

Stopped to see my friend and artist Justine in Brunswick, GA. She’s an amazing sculptor, one of the most creative people I know. She is currently doing a lot of pieces inspired by Klimt.

This sculpture is Golden Girl.

Home again home again to get some new work done before the Studio tour May 5 & 6 I have so many ideas now I don’t know where to start!

Next trip Amsterdam, Brussels, Luxomberg, Bruge…. but should have some posts about my art before then!

Posted on 2 Comments

Road Trip Apalach to Key West Orchids Birds and other stuff

Just before I left Apalachicola I found this mermaid carved out of a cypress trunk, I love it! It’s in the Botanical Garden adjacent to the Orman House.

kw mermaidOn my way south I made a few stops….

First was the bottle house in Carabelle.

kw bottle house2

Then I visited with friends in North Ft. Myers. We visited Babcock Ranch Preserve, a 67,000 acre parcel of undeveloped land where you can see birds, bears, alligators, fox, and all kinds of animals.

Selby Gardens had a show called Warhol, Flowers in the Factory. The gardens and orchids were beautiful and the art interesting.

f2

 

Just south of Sarasota at Venice is a bird rookery. We were thrilled to see parents feeding babies!

B1h1

B2

B3

B2

While I am not an avid birdwatcher I do love them and used to paint them a lot. This may inspire me to paint some more.

I took these photos at Six Mile Cypress Slough.

We watched this mother Limpkin feeding her young, and heard her smashing the snail on something to get the meat out.

limp1

limp9limp3limp4limp5limp6limp7limp8One interesting thing about this preserve is the driving force to save it was students.

In 1976 a group of Lee County students known as “the Monday Group” studied the role of forested wetland in Florida’s ecology and became alarmed at how fast these environmental treasures were disappearing to private interests. Knowing that Six-Mile Cypress Slough was under imminent threat from logging in the channeling away of its water, the Monday Group launched a daring campaign to save it for future generations.

Lee County voters responded overwhelmingly by increasing their own taxes to purchase and convert the Slough into a preserve. Much effort was needed throughout the 1980s to protect the Six-Mile Cypress watershed from the results of outside development. These efforts culminated in 1991 with Lee County Parks & Recreation opening the Preserve’s boardwalk and facilities to visitors.

Today, Parks & Recreation remain challenged with balancing the needs of water conservation and wildlife management with the recreational needs of the public. As part of that, a growing cadre of volunteer naturalists educates the Preserve’s many visitors as to the interrelationships of water, wildlife, plants, and man-fanning the flames of that torch set by Lee County students some two decades earlier. The Interpretive Center at the Six Mile Cypress Slough Preserve had its grand opening April 18, 2008. The 11,000 square foot building is the first public, certified Green Building in Lee County. It has been built under the nationally recognized “Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design” or LEED certification system.

I drove across the Tamiami Trail and saw hundreds of egrets – got no photos of them but did get this bird, an immature white ibis.

o20

I also counted over 50 alligators along the road, I finally stopped and got a couple photos of them, yikes!

o18o19I grow orchids and wanted to add to my collection so visited RF Orchids in Homestead. At 11 and 3 on Saturday and Sunday they give free tours of the botanical garden they have adjacent to the grounds, it’s actually the yard of the owners home. It was a highlight. of that part of my trip.

One of my favorite things in the world to do is drive down the Keys.

Michael and I lived in the Keys for a while between moving from Aspen to New Bern. I always said the Keys and Aspen were a lot alike in the respect that there is one way in and one way out. They were both isolated and you could get cabin fever.

And they are both incredibly beautiful.

Michael went to the Keys every winter (before me) for a month or two when he was farming and it was there that he proposed to me in 1983, so the Keys hold a special place in my heart.  Consequently I was hesitant about seeing the damage done by Irma. I had heard from friends that Big Pine (where we lived in 1988) and adjacent Keys were devastated, and I had seen a video of Key West where the water was a foot deep at Sloppy Joes.

kw big pine 1The middle Keys were pretty depressing. I’ve heard there were a lot of little tornadoes around the eye, there would be a lot of damage in one place, and right next to it things were ok. All the trees on Big Pine are beat up, there are boats and all kinds stuff in the canals and mangrove and it seems every house on the island sustained some damage and many were destroyed. I didn’t take any photos there because it was so sad. I started see damage in about Tavernier and it went all the way to Big Coppitt, about 70 miles.

I was in Key West for a day in January while on my Havana cruise, I had a long conversation with the bar tender in Sloppy Joes and he said they were so thankful for the cruise ships since the hurricane because for a long time tourists couldn’t get there and their businesses really suffered. He spoke about the problem of workers, that drove in to work from the middle keys,  had no place to live, so many left leaving a shortage of workers.

Because of that visit I knew things were pretty much back to normal in Key West but I didn’t know how the beautiful 120 mile drive from Card Sound to Key West would be. The drive crosses 42 bridges, the shortest being about 38 feet and the longest almost 7 miles. In 1981 when Michael was down there a truck struck the propane tank on the swing span of the 7 mile bridge causing an explosion which closed the bridge for a while to auto traffic and closed it for a year to marine traffic, so he was “stuck” staying a while longer, poor boy!

m1

This is a section of the old Flagler railroad bridge that is still standing. When Michael started going to the Keys in the 1970s he drove on the road that was on the top of the railroad bridge. I would not have liked to do that at all.

Since the campground on the the small key where we decided to get married was totally destroyed (it covered the entire key) by Irma and they have it all blocked off so you can’t enter I decided this would be a nice place to put some of Michaels ashes, he loved it in the Keys.

Next Post Key West