Inside The Artist’s Mind

Claudia O’Brien’s beautifully fantastic art allows her to “disconnect from the real world” into a space where the tiniest detail can reveal amazing depths and layers.

By Richard Anguiano • Photos by Steve Floethe

Claudia O’Brien’s name should be familiar to Ocala’s Good Life readers through her years of work as a contributing writer.

Last year, Claudia retired from freelance writing but still pursues creative outlets: photography and digital art.

“I’m kind of glad I don’t have deadlines anymore,” says Claudia, 78. “I wanted to be able to spend more time with my grandchildren and my art.”

Claudia’s career in media dates to the early 1960s in her native Miami. She met her husband of 55 years, Steve Floethe, also an Ocala’s Good Life photographer, in the newsroom of WCKT TV (now WSVN 7) in Miami. She was a newsroom assistant, and he was a fledgling reporter and the host of weekend interview programs.

Steve’s career as an anchorman and TV reporter took the couple to Sarasota, Panama City; Albany, GA; and Fort Myers. Along the way, Claudia worked as a newspaper reporter covering hospitals and writing feature stories and later founded a public relations firm. The couple’s busy schedule also included bringing up a daughter, Joanie, and a son, Brian.

Claudia’s foray into photography and digital art has its roots in the couple’s travels in the U.S. and Europe.

“We always had cameras in the house,” she says. “In Sarasota in the 1970s, I took a photography course at a vo-tech school. I had written for papers for many years and now I could take pictures.”

Claudia began persuing photography in a more artistic vein around the time she and Steve moved to Ocala in 2001. She exhibits her work in the online gallery fineartamerica.com. She’s also a member of the Artist Alley Alliance and exhibits her art in the Ocala group’s local and regional shows.

Claudia’s photography shows an eye for the obscure, as in “Gaper,” an image she took in the Zuiderzeemuseum in the Netherlands. The photo is a close-up of a colorful, gargoyle-like creature, grimacing with a pill on its tongue, of the sort that adorned buildings in the 17th century and advertised pharmacies in the days of widespread illiteracy.

She also seems to have a knack for capturing the serendipitous with her camera. “Devotion,” shot in a pasture near her home in Ocala, shows two Brahman cattle as one nuzzles the other.

“The universe,” says Claudia, “picked a good day for me to take pictures there.”

Meanwhile, her eye for detail, particularly in nature, is perhaps the most prevailing characteristic of Claudia’s work. A trip to Keukenhof, the famed garden in the Netherlands, at tulip time, generated her series, “Tulip Centricity.” Claudia took pictures with a small pocket camera, training its tiniest lens on the interiors of an array of tulips.

“I could easily either slip it completely inside or if the petals were partly opened, I could gently lean against them,” she recalls. “There was a way for regular light to get in and I was trying to avoid that.”

The results depict the vivid colors and patterns of the interiors of tulips, each as individual as a fingerprint.

“I didn’t use a flash,” says Claudia. “The sunlight came through the petals and that’s what gave it its color. I might have shadowed or deepened the color somewhat. But it was pretty much as it was first taken.”

Tulip Centricity

he advent of photo editing software took Claudia into the realm of digital art. Her usual process is to take an image from a photo—sometimes incorporating only its basic figures— and playing with color, line weight and shadow in the editing programs Adobe Photoshop and Topaz Studio.

“I have to teach myself,” says Claudia of the editing software. “I don’t do well reading the manual. The harder the time I have learning when I teach myself, the more I understand something and the more I end up using it.”

Often, she creates digital art from otherwise throwaway images she snapped years before and filed away.

One example is a favorite of Claudia’s, the series “Circles and Flowers,” inspired by a photo Claudia took in a field of strawflowers in Ireland.

“This was about 20 years ago, and I wasn’t thinking professionally at that time,” she recalls. “I just wanted to get a good photo, but it came back and

I thought, ‘Ugh, this is not much of anything.’ There was no center of interest, really.” “When I was working with it and experimenting digitally, the centers of the strawflowers ended up being what I used for the circles,” adds O’Brien.

The result is a series of three abstracts with swirling movement and shadows, each with a unique mood according to color selection.

Another work, “Glimpses in the Night,” sprang from what Claudia calls a “very bad” picture she took with “a cheapo camera” through a car window of a storage building in Sarasota.

“It really wasn’t usable,” she admits, “without turning it into a full-on abstract collage image.”

Claudia sometimes begins with something other than a visual image. She took a quote from Robert Toth, a sculptor and painter, as inspiration for her most recent work, “Whirlpool of Imagination.” Toth’s quote is “Artistic creativity is a whirlpool of imagination that swirls in the depths of the mind.”

In “digital oils,” Claudia created a swirl of aqua, purple, light blue and green, with accents of gold and brown.

Claudia says she finds her membership in Fine Art America rewarding. According to the site she has 461 followers and has had 193,510 visitors to her gallery.

“You get to know people from all over the world, mostly other artists,” says Claudia. “Somebody will see something, and they want to know how you did it. It’s strange to call it a fellowship, but that’s what it is. If someone comments on my art, I’ll always go and see their site.”

The site not only displays artists’ work, but it also allows them to sell their pieces in various formats, including canvas prints, framed prints, posters, metal prints, wood prints, and tapestries, among others.

Claudia also markets her work on the site pixels.com in formats including coffee cups.

She says her best-selling works include “Moon River,” an abstraction of one body of water emptying into another in Belgium, in mostly deep blues accented by a yellow moon; and “You Belong Among the Wildflowers,” named after a Tom Petty lyric, a gold-toned photo of a Marion County wildflower that buyers often put on cell phone covers.

Circles and Flowers

Along with the camaraderie with other artists, interaction with art lovers and a modest stream of income that results from her work, Claudia says she also enjoys benefits on many personal levels, including emotional and physical.

“I’ve always liked being outside with nature and to see things that maybe other people didn’t see or see things in a way that perhaps other people don’t see them,” says Claudia. “Without getting into details, we’ve had some hard times in our family, and it has become my refuge,” she says of her art. “If I can get my responsibilities out of the way and lock myself in a room with my computer, it’s great. Sometimes you just want to shut the door and disconnect from the real world.”

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