A Passion For Paint: Tales From The Trenches

Why are so many locals taking up art? Three retirees tell their stories.

A Passion for Paint: Tales from the Trenches

Why are so many locals taking up art? Three retirees tell their stories.

A passion for Paint: Tales from the Trenches by deborah borfitz photography by denise ritchie

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s one of the country’s best small “art towns,” Vero Beach is brimming with smart, creative and energetic people.

Artsy types have been flocking here since the turn of the 20th century, though some didn’t fully blossom until after their arrival. Spending time in our quaint seaside municipality seems to feed the imagination as much as bigger and better known cultural meccas like New York City and Santa Fe. Artists commonly heed the call with paint and easel. For many, women mostly, it is a singularly terrifying experience akin to giving birth. Learning to paint is a journey of self-discovery that with each revelation adds “uniqueness and personality” to the end product, says artist Susan Ferrara, who winters in the Marbrisa neighborhood. Her theory is that the urge to “keep creating” is in the DNA of the child-bearing sex, which would certainly help explain the lopsided female-to-male ratio in local art classes.

“Painting is the most exciting thing that has happened to me in my older age, other than becoming a grandmother,” says 63-year-old Susan, a retired English professor. “And it was such an accident.” In 2006, while living in Boca Grande with handsome CEO husband Arthur and an inquisitive golden retriever named Bo, Susan signed up for a watercolor class on a whim. “I loved it.”

Many more classes were to follow at the Chatham Creative Art Center on Cape Cod and the Vero Beach

Zebras, often with a hibiscus flower behind one ear, are a trademark theme of Linda Larkin’s work.

Museum of Art. The chemistry was particularly good with instructor Deborah Gooch, whose acrylic class at the museum spurred Susan’s transition to a looser, more liberal painting style. A series of playful and “exuberant” compositions surfaced, including a pair of elephants and festive renderings of her grandson with balloons and her granddaughter in ballerina costume. The repeating themes of “light, color and laughter” summon an upbeat mood.

Susan’s watercolors exude happiness with Mother Nature. A triptych of a water lily has been planted in the kitchen. A few fish in shades of green and blue — a print of one of her prized watercolors — proudly

swim on a bedroom wall. The original was exhibited in the Vero Beach Art Club’s “Art by the Sea” show four years ago, priced not to sell at $1,200.

It was snapped up the first day.

At the moment, oil is Susan’s preferred medium and the one through which her favorite work emerged: a portrait of granddaughter Adair at nine months. “When I showed it to my daughter, she cried,” recalls Susan. Cape Cod landscapes rendered in oil have been miniaturized and printed on notecards. Jungle Trail has captivated Susan since her move to Vero Beach six years ago.

Her first completed painting of the historic byway visually preserves Corrigan’s Boathouse, replaced by a

Since her move to Vero Beach six years ago, artist Susan Ferrara (shown here with “Bo�) has found scenes along Jungle Trail particularly captivating.

LOCAL PAINTING CLASSES WHERE

INSTRUCTORS

MEDIUMS

WHEN

CONTACT

Rita Ziegler, Betty Wade, Anette Gekle Marjorie Bohler Judith Ragusa

Oil, acrylic, watercolor, painting on glass

Various days and times

299-1234 www.artistsguildgalleryverobeach.com

Martha Ann Sloan

Acrylic and watercolor, “art & aperitif”

Various days and times

538-1989 www.createatstudioma.com

Darby Fine Art 1902 14th Ave.

Various

Workshops in all mediums

Periodically

480-0491 www.darbyfineart.com

Ellen Fischer (home studio) 1570 5th Court

Ellen Fischer

All mediums, new painters only

Saturdays 10-noon

564-2683

Jill Pease Gallery & Teaching Studio 1125 Commerce Ave.

Jill Pease & Dawn Miller

Oil, acrylic, pastel and intuitive painting

Thursdays and weekends

563-8525 www.jillpease.com

Various

Workshops, all mediums

Periodically

567-2212 www.lighthouseartandframing.com

Palm House Gallery & Studio 3227 Ocean Dr.

Emily Tremml, Rick Kelly and guest artists

Primarily oil

Tuesdays, Thursdays & periodic workshops

231-6816 www.palmhousegallery.com

Regina Stark Gallery 1110 Old Dixie Hwy.

Regina Stark

Acrylic, watercolor and mixed media

Various days and times

978-1697 www.reginastark.com

35+

All mediums

Various days and times

231-0707 www.verobeachmuseum.org

Artists Guild Gallery 1974 14th Ave.

Create at Studio M.A. 835 17th St.

Lighthouse Art & Framing 1875 14th Ave.

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Vero Beach Museum of Art 3001 Riverside Park Dr.

marina in 2008, when new construction could be seen arising between its dilapidated planks.

Each painting is first sketched in black and white “to work out some of the problems.” Susan generally works on multiple paintings simultaneously. This aids not only perspective but productivity – oils take a while to dry – and helps her “avoid the mud.” The quest to perfect one piece easily snowballs into repetitive do-overs that serve only to cloud the colors.

With three art classes per week, painting is more addiction than hobby, says Susan. On the roster in March were Dawn Miller’s “Architecture of the Face” drawing class, Charlotte Dickinson’s impressionist painting class, and a third on painting and drawing the figure with Deborah Gooch. Susan also recently attended a three-day workshop on “painting the impressionist figure” at Darby Fine Art with John Ebersberger, who paints in the Cape Cod impressionist style. On a “good week,” Susan figures she puts hand to paintbrush an impressive 19 hours, many of them while listening to a personalized playlist of songs on Internet radio.

“Painting helps me become more uniquely myself,” says Susan. “I used to be pretty timid. As a senior … getting out and learning something new is also good for the brain.” Fearlessly filling a canvas is self-nurturing, she adds, providing a respite of sort for women (like herself) who have spent a lifetime caring for others.

Admittedly, it was initially hard to claim time and space for selfdevelopment. Susan generally paints in the afternoon after all household responsibilities have been met. “The need to paint gnaws at me until I start to feel crazy and then, once I do, nothing bothers me much. Painting is almost like meditating. It’s very

The colorful home studio of Linda Larkin includes pastel sticks and pencils in every imaginable shade. She paints every day — and sometimes all day.

powerful stuff.”

The dining room is her studio of last resort. The lanai was too damp, the garage was too hot, the den was Arthur’s domain, and he wasn’t keen on her taking over the guest bedroom. “At Cape Cod, I have my own studio, built as a place to write a novel before I fell in love with painting.

It looks across the water and has a deck with big French doors.”

For all her accomplishments, Susan still struggles to believe she’s “good enough” and only recently

started calling herself an artist. The big learn has been that persevering through discouragement and the itch to quit is invariably followed by real progress. As a teacher in Cape Cod once told her, “Don’t listen to the inner critic. Just keep painting.

You’ll be surprised.”

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istractions rather than confidence have been the biggest hurdle in the painting life of full-time Riomar Bay resident Linda Larkin, a former

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Duke Habernickel, an “inveterate doodler,” turned out an impressive landscape in oil during an art workshop with Luke Steadman at the Palm House Gallery & Studio.

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interior designer who worked for a spell in the family citrus business. “I distract easily,” says the highly productive artist-in-transition. In the mid-1990s, Linda was regularly selling her Caribbean-colored, acrylic paintings at Vero’s Martha Lincoln Gallery. Not bad for a woman who only picked up a paintbrush two years earlier and, up to then, was entirely self-taught. “Now I can’t believe anyone ever bought them.

Once I took painting lessons, I realized I didn’t know anything!”

Linda began painting as a hobby in 1989, shortly after her husband’s death, inspired by a Haitian whose work with house paint on cardboard

was selling for hundreds of dollars apiece. She thought, “I can do that!” and bought some dime store acrylic paints and set out to turn out something artsy at the family’s Amelia Island beach house. It became the first of many painting trips with increasingly better remuneration from Martha Lincoln. Linda went on to have a couple of one-woman shows here and on the Little Palm Island Resort & Spa in the Keys.

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or more than a decade after this “acrylic period,” Linda mostly kept her paints stored away while tending to aging parents and the weddings of children

and grandchildren. A call from a childhood friend and watercolor instructor, inviting her along on a series of painting trips from Lyford Cay in the Bahamas to San Miguel de Allende in Mexico, re-ignited the creative juices. After five or six years, “I could do turquoise water, zebras, and palm trees, and that’s about it,” she says. “But it made me happy.” A fellow painter at Quail Valley suggested Linda try oil painting, which she has done with mixed success for several years.

But it was her introduction to pastels last fall by artist Dawn Miller that put Linda back on fire. She now paints every day and sometimes all day. One morning she became so lost “in the moment” she forgot about the eggs she had cooking on the stove. The overcooked ovals blew up like grenades, pelleting particulates kitchen-wide. Ironically, quick soapand-water clean-up is one of the reasons she took up pastel painting.

Another big plus of pastels is the dizzying array of available colors.

Admittedly, Linda has been overly fixated on color for years. Painting, she has only recently learned, is in actuality all about color values.

From what she spreads on a canvas to how she dresses for dinner and fills her personal space, Linda’s world is indeed a colorful one. Her primitive naïve art, near the kitchen, appears in the form of wildlife and, in her bedroom, a Caribbean-style version of her back porch. The lanai “gallery” is lined with brightly painted boats, flowers and island people.

In between, one encounters a hibiscus flower in oil and a rooster in pastel. And, oh, how she loves zebras.

They’ve been rendered in acrylic, oil, watercolor and pastel, more than once with a hibiscus behind one ear.

Linda’s home studio is impressively large and organized, with hundreds of pastel sticks and pencils neatly

“The trouble with oil is all the setup. You have to get the paints out, all the little colors, and get the palette knife and blend. By then, the phone rings or you want to eat or play golf.”

– duke habernickel

arranged and sorted by color. In March, she was producing a flamingo in three different mediums and comparing results. A series of West Indies scenes in her favored pastels was also in the works. No longer working off her lap, as in years past, she paints from an upright position with a loose wrist – occasionally turning the canvas upside down seeking flaws.

“Anyone can paint,” she insists, seemingly deflecting a compliment. “You just have to practice.” ot all artists are created equal, of course. John’s Island resident Max “Duke” Habernickel, a 77-year-old retired CEO, is an “inveterate doodler” who takes a whimsical approach to life that’s reflected in the how and why of his art.

Duke’s painting surface has more often been circumstantial, like a cocktail napkin or airline barf bag, than a conventional 24-by-30 canvas. A tiny work called Occupy Wall Street was rendered on a $100 bill. His mediums are likewise eclectic, from ink and colored pencils to beet juice and lawn grass.

Nearly the entirety of Duke’s portfolio is confined to a notebook a shade bigger than a playbill. Only in the last five years has he branched into more run-of-the-mill pastel and oil painting. And even those get photographically reproduced for book-display purposes.

“Why not?” may be one of his favorite lines. Duke began his doodling ways as a schoolboy in the early 1940s and doodled in lieu of note-taking in the lecture halls of Princeton and the corporate boardrooms of family mailorder company Haband.

Duke didn’t begin consolidating his doodles until early 2007, at the suggestion of one of his daughters. The notebook is chock full of little people and artistic remembrances atop various scraps of paper, including not just $100 bills but envelopes and postcards and a newspaper clipping about former New York Governor David Paterson. There are even a few people-doodles on the edge of the book’s pages.

One particularly creative piece, a photo of the original, captures his family watching a fireworks display. It was done in the dark, on the spot, using readily available grass and cabernet for the bursts of color. The edges were burned over an outdoor candle.

Many of Duke’s works involve the layering of color,

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intended as well as a few happy surprises. When the red from an abstract expressionist piece accidentally transferred to a subsequent page in his portfolio, he simply used it as a starting point for a new doodle. When ink bled through the napkin on which he was drawing a man, he used the reverse image to start a new picture and gave him a naked girlfriend to stare at.

Duke has played with minimalism, using opposing colors from one of his abstract field-and-sky scenes. From one of his pastels of a seated, oversized woman, he has crafted a triangular abstract. Duke’s sly humor shows up in a pile of colorful little people collectively shaped like a calf’s head and his drawing of a cherub holding a golf club. One photo enlarges a tiny picture he drew while watching a casting call. In it, a woman is nearly falling off her chair in boredom to the apparent oblivion of a wouldbe actor.

Two of the more recent additions to the collection are an on-site sketch of diners on stools at Orlando’s Hot Olives Restaurant and a colorful collage of people and flags at the Boom Boom Room in trendy Greenwich Village. Two of the odder manufactured “guests” in the collage are a gal named China, with a little beast emerging from one breast, and a guy with the head of a cat. If it’s any consolation to his models, Duke readily admits people never end up looking as he intended.

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ll this “idle scribbling” is purely for self-amusement, says Duke. Still, he takes his artistic proclivities seriously enough to sign up for many painting classes at the Vero Museum of Art and the Palm House Gallery & Studio. From instructor Rick Kelly came the “landmark instruction ‘whatever you do, the sky is blue,’ even if it seems to be all vermillion.” From Luke Steadman Duke learned “it’s all about the light, how it reflects off the top of a shoulder … or the front of a leg. It’s harder seeing it than painting it.”

Duke’s “latest favorite” piece is in fact not a doodle but a scene, in oil paint, from Lake Louise in Alberta, Canada.

“The trouble with oil is all the setup,” he says. “You have to get the paints out, all the little colors, and get the palette knife and blend. By then, the phone rings or you want to eat or play golf.”

It’s comparatively easy to find time to doodle, and after seven decades it’s an ingrained habit. “I can doodle while talking on the phone, watching fireworks, or eating a deep fried olive,” he says.

As the portable portfolio is only half full, Duke has plenty more doodling to do. “The goal is expression, ars gratia artis,” he says. Just don’t try to define it. “I really don’t know what an artist is — or art for that matter.” `

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