Alina Rubio is in constant communication with her future self. “I take my 45-year-old self out to coffee,” says the 29-year-old sculptor and owner of southeast Naples’ art studio and creative workspace, MasterPeace. “I talk to her about who she is, what she looks like, feels like, even what her house, furniture and art collection looks like—I hope she has a super cool art collection.” Treating her imagined future like a present reality helps Alina understand what she wants out of life and pursue her goals with intention.

The Miami native has often felt the pull of her older, wiser self at turning points in her journey. During her college years, Alina befriended a fellow artist and introduced herself as a sculptor. There was just one problem—she’d never sculpted before. But, the voice inside compelled her to try. That night, Alina went home and created her first sculpture—a silhouette of a woman carved into wood. Years later, after a stint as a gallerist and art adviser at Miami’s blue-chip Opera Gallery, she felt the pull again. This time, the now-bonafide sculptor was visiting Naples for an art fair and stumbled across the quirky, A-framed shopping complex off Tamiami Trail that became MasterPeace.

[caption id="attachment_71888" align="aligncenter" width="850"] Alina Rubio combines her passions for art, wellness, design, music and education at MasterPeace, a Naples-based studio workshop offering weekly classes, where people at any skill level can embrace creativity. Photography by Christina Bankson[/caption]

Alina set up shop in Naples in May of 2023 to create a safe space where anyone can reflect and explore their creativity through the arts. She is not an art therapist, but Alina’s classes mirror the practice’s principal ideas. “A lot of wellness comes from dedicating a little time to ourselves, whether by drinking more water, going for a walk, listening to music or writing in your journal. MasterPeace is just like an extension of that idea,” she says. In this stylishly serene, open-concept space, the sculptor blends her experience in the Miami fine arts world with her interests in the arts, wellness and education, offering art workshops weekly (and private events) suited for any skill level.

Each workshop is a bit different: One week may combine working with clay and doing yoga with Kim Quan from The Flow Body yoga studio, while the next might be painting and listening to live music from local musicians and Florida Gulf Coast University students. Each class is tailored to foster community and creative ‘flow.’ “For my dad, ‘flow’ has been an important word,” Alina says of the unbridled state of focus and inspiration often described by artists. “It’s like time is slow and fast at the same time and you are just connected.” Throughout her life, Alina watched her parents—her dad is a first-generation Cuban American; her mom emigrated from Venezuela after Alina was born—push through hardships and build successful businesses. Even in the midst of turmoil, her dad tended a lush garden. It kept him centered and present. Through years of reading psychology journals and plumbing anecdotal evidence shared by other creatives, Alina realized being present is the key to mastering creative flow—though that may be easier said than done. “Oftentimes, we get in our heads thinking about the future or the past,” she says. “I’m very guilty of doing that, and with the flow state, it really brings you into a moment of absolute presence in the now.”

[caption id="attachment_71889" align="aligncenter" width="683"] The MasterPeace owner and sculptor displays some of her heritage-inspired creations, such as Chair with Pearl Earring, in the studio. The minimalist, high-back chair is adorned with an oversized stud and hoop, representing the sentimental weight of family heirlooms. Photography by Christina Bankson[/caption]

Alina earned a degree in early childhood education and a minor in fine arts from Florida International University (FIU) in 2018. There, she studied under renowned Miami sculptor Robert Chambers and found refuge in the fifth-floor library. An avid reader, Alina is fascinated by the psychology behind creativity—how it impacts people, relationships and society. Combining this fascination with her studies of teaching methods like Reggio Emilia (a curiosity-driven approach to education out of Italy that is similar to the Montessori method), the MasterPeace maven aims to expose more people to the benefits of investing in the artistic side of their brain in a no-pressure environment, so her students can be more present and tapped in with their inner selves. “It’s a very constructivist teaching style, which means that it is really led by the student and not necessarily led by the teacher. So, I don’t tell you what to do. You tell me what you’re interested in, and we work from there,” Alina says.

While the sculptor looks to her future self for courage, she calls on her past for inspiration. The MasterPeace studio is lined with sculptures and works-in-progress deeply rooted in familial relationships and history. Alina refers to some of her pieces, like Chair with Pearl Earring, as ‘sculptural heirlooms.’ The sturdy wooden chair, seemingly pierced with an oversized pearl stud, signifies the act of passing down an object imbued with memories and sentimental meaning. Recently, she has started producing ‘sculptural poems,’ a series of life-sized shadow boxes that display hand-made sculptures symbolic of her unique connection with specific family members and loved ones.

[caption id="attachment_71890" align="aligncenter" width="683"] Alina follows a creativity- and curiosity-driven Reggio Emilia-inspired teaching method for her ever-evolving workshops. Themes like yoga and pottery set the stage for inspiration, and Alina offers guidance, but students create freely in a no-pressure environment. Photography by Christina Bankson[/caption]

MasterPeace itself is something of a living artwork, underscoring the significance of creativity in every aspect of our lives while weaving together all of Alina’s callings. “Growing up, it always felt like society was putting some kind of rock on my shoulders, telling me I had to pick just one,” Alina says. “ [MasterPeace] pulls together all the things that I have ever loved. This is the poetry. It’s the music. It’s the sculpture. It’s the art. It’s the wellness. It’s the therapy. This is everything.”

[ngg src="galleries" ids="433" display="basic_thumbnail" thumbnail_crop="0"]

The post Naples’ Best New Art Workshop appeared first on Gulfshore Life.

In April, photographer Harry De Zitter found himself standing in the middle of a road in his native South Africa. He was talking with a friend in the Karoo, an arid region covered with low scrub brushes. The open, umber-colored plains surrounding them reached into infinite stretches as another man approached. Harry’s focus drifted to the newcomer’s fraying boots and the dusty, shattered asphalt beneath. He couldn’t help but take a shot. The resulting black-and-white photograph is so sparse and candid that it becomes affectingly intimate.

Harry, who spends most of the year in Naples, has a decades-long career as an advertising photographer. He’s a titan in the industry, globetrotting to cover splashy campaigns for dozens of top-tier clients, ranging from Mercedes-Benz and Stella Artois to Wrangler and IBM. He’s photographed Paul McCartney and Bill Gates, run studios in New York City and London, and published work in Elle Italia and Conde Nast Traveler.

[caption id="attachment_70895" align="aligncenter" width="300"] For his personal work, the advertising photographer titan shoots in grayscale. “Black and white gets at the reality of the place,” he says.[/caption]

But, when it comes to his personal projects, Harry favors story-driven compositions in black and white. Images like the one he captured on that desert road this past spring, Worker with Well-Worn Boots, elevate the aloof or mundane into a haunting human treatise and distinguish the photographer as an artist. “My viewfinder is my window to the world,” he says.

[caption id="attachment_70894" align="alignleft" width="300"] Family Waiting at Bus Stop, Natal, South Africa (1988)[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_70893" align="alignright" width="300"] Farm Landscape, Overberg, South Africa (2017)[/caption]

Harry estimates that 90 percent of his work as an advertising photographer has been in color; his black-and-white photographs are all his—a fascination that’s stayed with him since college. He recalls the campus’ dark room and watching his first black-and-white shot come into focus under dim red light. “I was smitten,” he says. “It was magic.”

As his career in advertising photography coalesced, Harry kept returning to his monochromatic passions. It has cojones (nerve), he says of the grayscale palette. “It has texture; it has soul,” he adds, leaning forward in a burst of animation. “It reminds me of hearing a record producer talk about digital recordings, that they’re sometimes too clean. You need grit and noise.”

The absence of color, combined with Harry’s uncanny observational acumen, has yielded hundreds of black-and-white photos documenting people, places and possessions across the planet. In monochrome, Harry’s work is less encumbered by visual distractions, making his images sharper, starker. “Black and white gets at the reality of the place,” he says.

[caption id="attachment_70892" align="alignleft" width="300"] Worker with Well-Worn Boots, Middelpos, Karoo, South Africa (2024)[/caption]

Look at his photographs like Chrysler Building and Empire State Building. The images capture New York City’s famed landmarks, not as chipper postcard scenes but almost ominously in their achromatic states—a reminder that there’s more grit than glamour in the city’s grind. The same pathos is palpable in his monochrome landscapes. In The Everglades, part of his Chasing Clouds series, the inky undersides of thunderheads swell forebodingly over the swamp’s horizon. “That image wouldn’t have the same power in color,” he says definitively.

Grayscale photography has a narrative quality, too, Harry says, particularly with human subjects. In the 2019 Grandmother Shopping with her Granddaughter at Thursday Market, Harry captures a tender moment amid the streets of Bassano del Grappa, a town in northern Italy. The double portrait narrows in on the pair’s interlocked arms and hands, cropping out their faces entirely. The generational gap is evident through their wardrobe—the granddaughter wears a baggy Adidas shirt; the grandmother, a tidy ensemble with a structured handbag—and the warmth is palpable with how they lean on each other. “I was moved by the granddaughter’s tenderness for her grandmother,” Harry says. “The act of her affectionately holding her grandmother’s arm, whereas most teenagers would be too embarrassed to be seen with their grandparent, [struck me].”

[caption id="attachment_70897" align="alignleft" width="300"] Grandmother Shopping with her Granddaughter at Thursday Market, Bassano del Grappa, Italy (2019)[/caption]

As they talked, the nonna told him that Lino Manfrotto, the founder of renowned photography and videography equipment company Manfrotto, had been her wedding photographer. She didn’t know Harry had been an ambassador and product tester for the brand for years, a partnership that continues to this day.

Born in Belgium, Harry and his family moved to South Africa’s Eastern Cape when he was 9 months old. At 18, he enrolled in the Port Elizabeth Art School (now part of Nelson Mandela University) and soon found work as an assistant in his professor’s son’s darkroom. “I’ve had to be very versatile,” Harry says. “In the United States and Europe, photographers specialize because there are so many people working in places like New York, London, Paris. But in South Africa, you had to do it all—cars, fashion, still life.”

Much of Harry’s South African photography serves as a documentation of his home as he knows it: interior shots of his brother’s workshop, portraits of longtime friends and prominent creatives, candid shots of locals in various parts of the country. 

[caption id="attachment_70896" align="alignleft" width="300"] Chrysler Building, New York City, New York (1995)[/caption]

Amid these familial and fraternal frames are photographs like Family Waiting at Bus Stop. The arresting image, shot for Manfrotto, captures an African family of nine deep in the Zulu nation (one of South Africa’s native populations). The subjects seem to scrutinize the man behind the lens—the younger family members stare back, unabashed but slightly defensive, except for two: an infant and a young boy in a dark V-neck sweater. The boy looks vulnerable and forlorn, having resigned himself to this stranger taking his photo. The feeling of surrender in his eyes betrays his siblings’ stoicism. Harry felt the tension when he snapped the shot, but rather than shy from discomfort, he leaned into the honesty of the moment.

After all, his goal is to capture the raw beauty and truth of life. “There’s something about the strength of black and white,” Harry says. “I’ve always had a little thing on my shoulder—I don’t want to call it an angel, because I’m not religious—telling me to shoot in black and white.”

[caption id="attachment_70900" align="aligncenter" width="200"] Harry De Zitter’s Schoolgirls Buying Train Tickets, Zushi, Japan (1986)[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_70901" align="aligncenter" width="300"] WWII Liberty Ship in Fog, Embarcadero, San Francisco (1996)[/caption]

The post Meet Naples Visionary Photographer Harry De Zitter appeared first on Gulfshore Life.

Years had passed since she used these muscles, but it felt natural. The piece was just a simple sketch of a plant cell for her son’s homework, but Martha Maria Cantu was instantly lost in the process. Once finished, the young mother looked up to see a pair of saucer-sized eyes staring at the page. “He called over his siblings and said, ‘Look, look what Mom did! She’s like a professional artist,’ and I was like, ‘What do you mean? I am a professional artist,’” Martha says, chuckling at the memory.

The kids watched in awe as Martha pulled drawings and paintings that hadn’t seen light in years. Some sported blue ribbons or newspaper clippings. Questions came pouring from every direction. Did she miss it? Yes, desperately. Why didn’t she draw anymore? She didn’t know.

That was about eight years ago. When you drive into Immokalee today, you’ll see a welcome sign Martha Maria Cantu painted that pays tribute to her community, with calloused hands enveloping a young seedling against a background of farmland, football fields, encroaching tides and a pulsing sunset. Her most prominent mural, three panels depicting Everglades wildlife, migrant farmworkers and early Florida cattle drivers, stretches along the side wall of Main Street’s 7-11 in a graphic riff on expressionist style. Through the public art commissions and exhibits across Southwest Florida, Martha has become one of the breakout artists of Immokalee’s quietly growing arts scene. And portraits are the artist’s calling card.

It all begins with the eyes. Light-bleached vacancies shatter irises that burst with fuchsia, amber and goldenrod, adding dimension to darker hues. Shadows and reflections creep out from black, cavernous pupils. The subtle curvature of each eyelid signals uncanny emotion. “Once I get [the eyes] down, I know I’ve got this,” she says. “Everything else is a blur.”

Despite commonalities, the population in Martha’s hometown is no monolith—artistic, agricultural, medical, culinary and educational aspirations abound alongside rigid traditionalism, even when opportunity feels scarce. Complexity and nuance characterize the people of Immokalee and, in turn, Martha’s portraiture.

Crafted in her makeshift bedside studio with colored pencils, pastels, acrylic paint or oils, her arresting portraits depict people she sees every day and people she admires. The artist sees a person’s story reflected in their eyes and the lines etched into their skin—two of the most prominent and detailed aspects of her representational work. She is drawn to subjects whose faces are marked with years of toil and struggle but whose eyes portray kindness and strength. Living in Immokalee, where economic strain and limited resources are met with limitless resolve, subjects like these are often close at hand.

When Martha heard the story of an older man known as Don Andres, she saw all those magnetic qualities in his eyes. For decades, Don Andres has worked odd jobs picking up cans or laboring in neighbors’ yards and sent what money he made back home to Mexico to support a wife he has not seen in nearly 40 years. Martha Maria Cantu does not glamorize her subjects. In his portrait, Don Andres’ skin is sun-worn and cracked, and his wardrobe, a tattered baseball cap and sun-bleached T-shirt, sags with daily use. Beneath the oasis of mottled shade cast by his favorite tree in Immokalee, the man’s gaze is burdened but steady.

Martha was born in Mexico and immigrated to the United States when she was 4. She moved here with her mother, a woman whose cruel and exacting nature would sculpt her daughter’s artistic journey. Martha’s stepfather came into her life around this time, too. He didn’t speak much Spanish, and as a child, Martha spoke little English. In the evenings, while her mother was at work, Martha would sit silently nearby—not so close that she’d get in the way but near enough to not feel alone—as he watched wrestling on TV. Today, she remembers the gruff and kind-hearted man as “Dad,” but at 7, she didn’t know if he could be trusted. Few people in her life had proven worthy of her faith.

In an effort to connect, Martha showed her father a drawing of the Jesus painting that hung on their wall in pious observation. In his best pidgin, her dad told her not to interrupt his wrestling again until her drawing looked just like the picture. Without instruction or books or anything but an ingrained attention to detail, the child set to work. “I don’t remember how long it took—hours, days, weeks—but I got it to look just like what was on the wall. I showed my dad, and he was astonished,” she says. “He didn’t need to say anything—that was it, and I was hooked.”

Finding approval at home never came easy, but at school, the young artist’s skills were celebrated—and nurtured. She remembers the art teachers who pushed her to enter competitions and got her an interview with Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota. “Winning awards, being on the news and in magazines—that was great, but it was just never enough for Mother,” she says.

With only a third-grade education, Martha’s mother did not care for her straight-As and art competition victories. She could be both verbally and physically abusive, and when these methods of discipline failed to faze her daughter, she sprinted to Martha’s room and destroyed every piece of artwork she could find.

The opportunity to attend Ringling felt like the beginning of a new chapter, one where she could silence internal and external voices of doubt. After weeks of courting the young artist over the phone and through email, the dean of students met Martha Maria Cantu face-to-face. As a woman of color from a home that rarely had air conditioning, much less pricey art supplies, Martha was not their typical demographic. Her acceptance was rescinded. Martha would be better suited for community college, the director said. “He looked down on me, not because of what I’ve done or what I could do, but just because of who I was and what I looked like,” she says.

After the rejection, Martha married, had children and gained stepchildren—mothering 10 altogether. The dormant artist focused on creating a different home from the one that raised her. As her children grew, they reciprocated her love and support, pushing their reserved mother to rebuke the fear of rejection and embrace her talents. The artists who inspire Martha are not Renaissance greats or vanguards of modernism; they are her children, who will not allow her to quit again. Among her kids—from elementary to post-graduate age—several aspire to artistry, like their mother.

Martha hangs their clay figurines and Japanese manga panels alongside her own artwork; their creations fill her studio with levity and joy. “I really want to inspire the younger kids. I didn’t have that inspiration or that outlet [growing up], and I want to give that to them—not only with my artwork but also my home,” she says.

Recently, her son asked for a spare sketchbook for a friend who couldn’t afford materials. She happily sent it over as a birthday gift. When Martha came to pick the kids up from school soon after, the boy ran over to her, nervous and excited to flip through the sketchbook and show her his latest work. One of the sketches had won him a $2,000 prize. “If they don’t have that person pushing them, I’m here, I’ll listen,” she says. “I have the time. I have a bunch of kids, but I have room. I love to cook. I do the cleaning like it’s nothing. I’ll be your mom. I’ll be that.”  

The post Meet One of Southwest Florida’s Top Portrait Artists appeared first on Gulfshore Life.

In Cheri Dunnigan’s Naples home studio, a severed tree stump reveals a hodge-podge of bundled wires, anvils, pliers and forming tools. Here, the renowned metalsmith designer spends months weaving each of her intricate, lace-like sculptures and jewelry, be it a double helix collar or a glimmering sundial medallion.

The artist’s work is at once soft and brawny, twisting in on itself again and again in a dizzying whirlpool of woven wire—combining techniques of metalworking and textile creation. “I work with one basic stitch with metal, but the way I put those stitches together gives me this broad range of things I can create,” Cheri says. The Massachussets-bred artist’s Woven Collection, a series of delicate, chainmail-like jewelry and sculptures, displays a serpentine musculature that coils and stretches as if poised to strike. Cheri’s woven works often mimic the geometry of natural configurations—like the curve of a nautilus, the center of a sunflower or a tightly coiled fern. The metalsmith’s ornate Byzantine and Dandella collections, on the other hand, showcase sundial medallions embossed with gold, sterling and freshwater pearls.

Her mother’s Armenian heritage is inextricably linked with her creative identity. At 3 years old, Cheri proclaimed to her Sunday school teacher that she didn’t just want to be an artist but an Armenian artist. She takes pride in her people’s history, even the parts that cause her pain. Somewhere between 600,000 and 1.2 million Armenian Christians were murdered in what scholars refer to as the Armenian genocide, which occurred in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Before the tragedy, Armenians had been known for their expert craftsmanship and artistry, but many generational artforms were lost as families fled to escape the conflict. Cheri was in her 30s before she learned the meaning of her mother’s maiden name: Jaffarian, or “son of a jeweler.”

“There was a legend in our family that there had been jewelers in the old country way back, but the farthest back we knew, my great grandfather had owned a shoe factory in Armenia,” Cheri says. The discovery bolstered and gave credence to her work. A lace-making conference in Italy connected the metalsmith with a network of textile artists and reinforced her interest in modern weaving techniques. Before all that, Cheri was already entrenched in jewelry making, drawn to the craft as if by divine guidance. “When you’re creating, there’s a sense of something bigger than yourself working with you—it’s a spiritual thing,” she says. 

As Cheri’s interest in her culture grew, she began to see parallels between her woven jewelry and the tradition of Armenian needle lace, a generational lace-making technique marked by fine detail and elaborate patterns passed from mothers to daughters. After World War I, the craft allowed female refugees to establish businesses and support themselves abroad. “For me, it’s a symbol of the survival of the culture, because it was the only artform that really truly survived the ashes of the genocide,” Cheri says.

During high school in Massachusetts, Cheri’s teacher was an avid weaver and her husband worked as a master metalsmith. The two devised a metalworking project for Cheri’s class—a basic, linear broach made with hammered wire. Compared to her current work, the broach was a simple trinket, but it unlocked the gates to discovery. “The minute I touched [the metal], I was smitten,” she says.

Cheri’s teacher took the 15-year-old under her wing, encouraging her aptitude with metalwork and instilling basic principles of weaving, crocheting and macrame. “They would give me the keys to his studio and let me just work on whatever I wanted to,” she says. At Cleveland Institute of Art, where Cheri pursued the prestigious five-year metalsmithing program, she studied under revered jewelry designer John Paul Miller. “Everything he did was just so well done, so beautiful, so exquisite. The pursuit of beauty was important to him, and that rubbed off on me,” she says. Cheri’s work departs from John Paul’s style—which often depicts butterflies, moths, scorpions and cephalopods with a more direct, representational approach—but reflects his baroque intensity with a softer edge.

After college, the metalsmith ran a successful jewelry shop for eight years before relocating with her husband to Naples in 1994. Four years later, she was diagnosed with crippling lupus, a chronic autoimmune disease with no cure. Cheri had experienced bouts of extreme fatigue and soreness since she was 21 years old, and after having her son at 39, the episodes became more frequent and severe. Cheri grappled with shortness of breath and joint pain, particularly in her hands. “I thought if I ever had to give up metalwork, it would be like giving up breathing,” she recalls.

As Cheri’s dexterity faltered, the metalsmith found solace in painting. “I felt like the Lord spoke and said, ‘Stop focusing on what you can’t do, and start focusing on what you can do,’” she says. Her husband furnished a makeshift studio in their home. “I would crawl in there feeling horrible and come out skipping hours later,” Cheri says. “I really believe I painted my way into remission.”

Ultimately, the artist was unwilling to fully give up metalwork and would make pieces for her mother for Christmas, birthdays or Mother’s Day. The approach was far more limited, but each piece stretched her creativity. Around 2010, she crafted a necklace with intricate medallion shapes for her mother and felt her nimble fingers growing strong again as her condition went into remission. With her artistic energy reignited, she started to create limited-edition collections of one-of-a-kind adornments.

[caption id="attachment_65743" align="aligncenter" width="850"] Cheri Dunnigan's intricate metal weaving technique blends elements of metalsmithing and textile arts. (Photo by Anna Nguyen)[/caption]

Cheri’s now-coveted Dandella collection showcases her affinity for Armenian needle lace, with Akoya pearl-adorned pendants that resemble the craft’s delicate, web-like patterns. The Byzantine collection sees golden medallions encircled with precious stones and dainty arches of silver beads, calling to historic Roman coin pendants and brooches. Her Woven line of jewels and sculptures emphasizes Cheri’s apt blending of knitting and metalsmithing techniques.

When virtuoso gallerist and designer Chad Jensen—of Naples’ METHOD & CONCEPT, which now represents the artist—discovered Cheri’s work last year, he was drawn to her craftsmanship and attention to detail. Since then, the two have collaborated to expand Cheri’s repertoire, with Chad challenging her to experiment with larger sculptural works and different metals and coatings. “A lot of what we think about is future heirlooms and modern antiquities,” he says. “Her pieces could be on someone’s shelf in hundreds of years. They could look back and still think about how amazing her craftsmanship was and her attention to detail.”

Detailed, ornate and methodical, Cheri’s work mirrors traditional patterns in a way that looks fresh and awe-inspiring today. “My husband saw photographs of the lace and said, ‘I think you had a DNA leak,’” she says with a laugh. “Growing up in the shadow of that tragedy, I always wanted to do something creatively that would honor what happened to my grandparents’ generation. Then I found myself making these pieces that resembled the lace. It was like the Lord handed me the thread and said, ‘Make it in gold.’”

The post This Naples Artist Makes Lace-Like Jewelry Out of Metal appeared first on Gulfshore Life.

Michael Slabach starts with his version of a canvas—a pair of double-walled glasses undulating like a snake bobbing from side to side before striking. The funhouse mirror-style vessels show tight layers of frothed milk and velvety espresso—Michael’s media.

The 33-year-old bartender-turned-social media creative runs the Instagram page @michaelmatthew_, which he launched during the pandemic after 10 years of working in the service industry. His meteoric rise took him from downloading the app for the first time in 2020 to today’s mass following, with more than 140,000 people gobbling up his eye-catching coffee and cocktail videos. One of his posts of an iced mocha latte with ringlets of chocolate syrup sprayed on with a milk frother and served in a pair of snaky glasses garnered more than 252 million views.

He gets the same feeling with every view and ‘like’ as he did when working behind the bar at The Dock at Crayton Cove, slinging craft cocktails to his customers’ delight. On his social media page, the fleeting nature of the creations is cemented with every post. “Not being corny—it really does make me happy to make other people happy,” Michael says.

Michael’s gallery is his Instagram feed. His studio is his East Naples home, where he installed a full-sized bar in an east-facing spare bedroom. “I’ve got it down pat,” he says. “I know that at 7:30 a.m., you’re going to get moody light before the sun comes up. At 8:30 a.m., you can’t shoot because the sun overexposes the camera [and] 4 p.m. is the best time because you get the golden hour.”

Below the bar and on nearby shelves, he stocks muddlers, shakers, between 30 and 50 spirits, dozens of homemade and store-bought syrups, and about 200 hundred glasses in funky asymmetrical and geometric forms. The vessels are key. “The shape and size of the glass can influence the aroma, temperature and overall flavor profile,” he says. He looks for lead-free glasses to avoid unwanted flavors seeping in and is meticulous in his applications: Espresso drinks get narrow-mouthed glasses to concentrate the aromas; lattes get taller glasses to showcase the layers; garnished cocktails go in wide-mouthed wares to emphasize the toppings. Among his tools of the trade is a Zulay Magia automatic espresso machine—the beating heart of his creative operation.

Michael’s masterpieces swing between Tajin-rimmed, spicy margaritas to mocha macchiatos with chocolate flower drizzles adorning a milk foam crown. Jazzy melodies set the tone for perfect pours and generous swirls, giving his videos a sumptuous, hypnotic feeling. The act of creating takes mere minutes, but the process of generating ideas is laborious. Michael often wakes up at 3:30 a.m. and starts researching drink trends and looking for inspiration. At any given moment, there are about 10 ideas written on an expansive whiteboard in his room. Michael narrows down from there to make his daily videos.

In a recent clip, Michael whipped up a caramel dalgona (a whipped coffee drink originating in South Korea), using a handheld frother to blend sugar, hot water and instant coffee before pouring the airy mixture over cream and ice spheres. He finished by stirring the concoction and lifting the drink out of the frame. It’s easy to imagine taking a sip of the voluptuous blend.

Like many artists, Michael’s journey has been nonlinear. He played baseball for most of his life and studied sports management at Miami’s Barry University. Talent scouts were interested until he tore an elbow ligament during practice, ending his MLB prospects.

In 2013, Michael came home to Naples, looking for direction for his career. He heard of lucrative opportunities working in the service industry during season. After a decade of working behind the bar at The Dock, Celebration Park and Tacos and Tequila Cantina, Michael started his drinks Instagram page in March 2022. Less than a year later, the chocolate ringlet video, which has had more views than Taylor Swift’s most-watched video on Instagram, sent Michael’s following into orbit. The clip put him on the map for brands, leading to sponsorships with glassware, espresso beans and syrup companies. When he crested 100,000 followers, Michael decided to go full-time with his endeavor.

A quick scroll through the page shows a caramel corn latte garnished with popcorn; rosemary- and cranberry-studded ice cubes in a Christmas vodka cranberry cocktail,  strained through a glass ornament; and a Valentine’s Day spin on cold brew with muddled strawberries and bourbon. A pineapple-coconut iced coffee, served in blue and white-bottomed glasses, is reminiscent of the Gulf’s shore, with a gradient from blue to sandy tan hues. He’s big on textures. “Nobody can taste it through the app,” Michael says. “You have to show people.” His café con leche comprises condensed milk under two espresso shots and a cap of sweet, cold foam cresting the rim of a stout, wide-mouthed glass. He likes topping his cold brews with chocolate cream foam because it reminds him of drinking chocolate milk as a kid. He serves the drink in the playful, funhouse-like glasses. “[The glass] adds another layer of artistry,” he says. “The tactile feedback, the way it catches and plays with the light, the sounds of stirring—all of these elements elevate the entire process and make it more engaging.”

His affinity fuels future ambitions. On the horizon, he eyes opening a brick-and-mortar, creating a coffee line and launching a line of glassware. “It’s about taking something everyday and making it extraordinary,” he says. 

[ngg src="galleries" ids="367" display="basic_thumbnail" thumbnail_crop="0"]Photography- Christina Bankson & Courtesy Michael Slabach

The post This Naples Bartender Turns Caffeine and Cocktails Into Art appeared first on Gulfshore Life.

Inside Jordan Blankenship’s Estero studio, sunlight pours over rulers, metal ribs, calipers and porcelain cups packed with wooden tools. With the sound of the wheel humming in the background, the artist spends her days making handcrafted, functional pottery for the home. 

Long before founding her line, JordanBCeramics, the Florida native grew up moving across the state for her dad’s career as a soccer coach. She became attuned to the things she and her family carried along the way. Jordan remembers her grandmother’s heirloom plates and mugs carefully wrapped from move to move, only to be unwrapped and stored for safekeeping in the back of a shadowed cabinet in the new home. “Eventually, we realized that we valued them too much just to use them for the holidays,” she says. “Why keep the good stuff locked away?”

As a freshman at Florida Gulf Coast University, Jordan enrolled in her first ceramics class. Though she had no prior experience, she’d heard rumors around the arts complex that wheel throwing was the best course. Students would spend lots of time together practicing after class, sharing equipment and building community. “It was like this light bulb went off,” she remembers. “It was a really good energy, and I knew I wanted to be there.”

The budding artist spent the rest of her collegiate career sharpening her skills and developing her craft. “The second I touched clay,” she says, “I realized the more time I put into it, the better everything became.” Following graduation, she worked as the art director at a ceramic studio in Naples while launching her first collection on the side.

Determined to turn her passion into a profession, Jordan pursued a master’s degree in fine arts at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. The further she dove into the craft, the more she understood pottery could be a thing to treasure and enjoy at the same time. “I wanted to show people how functional ceramics can both be an art form and something you use every day,” she says. “When you elevate that and notice that it’s art, you get this new perception of how important the little things in your life can become.” 

In the meantime, she unveiled a second ceramics collection founded on a series of stacking pieces such as jars, coffee pour-overs, mugs and teapots, all of which allowed people to mix and match slowly while customizing around their daily routines. “People are thinking about ceramics, but subconsciously, not intentionally,” she explains. “I’m trying to reimagine something familiar, so they get excited to start their day with something as simple as a mug.”

Like many artists, Jordan finds fulfillment in the creative process and physical demands of her work. “You have to completely reimagine how you’re positioning your body to throw a piece,” she shares. “I always think of people when they do meditation and center themselves. The same thing happens when I’m throwing on the wheel—it’s this great balance.”

[caption id="attachment_59972" align="aligncenter" width="850"] Estero-based ceramicist Jordan Blankenship (Photo by Anna Nguyen)[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_59973" align="aligncenter" width="681"] Jordan opts for neutral hues to emphasize the functionality of her ceramics, which include tablewares and planters. (Photo by Anna Nguyen)[/caption]

Be it a speckled match striker or a mug glazed in black matte, every piece of work starts on the wheel with pre-measured clay to ensure consistent sizing and dimensions. After they’re shaped, the pieces are put on shelves to dry before being fired, glazed and fired again. From start to finish, it is a 100 percent handmade process. Since stoneware is the gold standard for durability, the artworks can be used every day and are dishwasher, oven and microwave safe. Each new piece feels like a gift to herself—and the future owner. “It’s like Christmas every time you open the kiln,” she says. “When you see something, and it works exactly how you envisioned it, that’s the magic moment.”

Jordan describes her aesthetic as simplistic, with a focus on form and neutral colors. “I’ve embraced the fact that I like to keep everything minimal, though I’ll focus on changing the shape, form, or subtle lines and curves,” she shares. “That’s where I find my joy.” 

Despite making roughly 1,000 pieces of pottery a month, the ceramicist takes pride in still being a one-woman operation. Recently, she solicited her mother to help with packing and mailing orders to her roughly 60 standalone retailers across the country. “I call her the shipping and handling department,” Jordan jokes. 

Jordan’s house in Estero has been retrofitted into a studio, with wheel-throwing in the office, kiln firing and glazing in the garage and packaging and storage in the dining room. Eventually, she’ll have to move into a larger building as she expands her business. “I want to become a big studio where I have other potters working with me to create home decor and dinnerware lines,” she says. She also envisions a space where people can watch the creation process before picking out the pieces they want to go home with. “I like the idea of adapting and changing … as long as it’s always going to be handmade, and it’s a great group of people working together and having fun, that’s the goal.”

While JordanBCeramics grows and evolves, Jordan’s work continues to focus on elevating the slow, daily rituals in life. Her best-selling mugs make the morning cup of coffee a little sweeter; her popular candleholders are bright spots on dinner tables. Recently, she started cross-selling her ceramics with other makers’ goods—a pair of Bluecorn beeswax candles go well with Jordan’s tall candle tapers for a lovely gift. She’s also been playing with cork, fashioning coasters and lids combined with ceramic to make the pieces more functional.

Whether she’s throwing a cereal bowl, a juicer or a dinner plate, Jordan aims to bring joy to the day-to-day. “Ceramics have the potential to change the way we view our relationship with objects,” she says. “I make the piece and that’s my relationship with it, but once someone takes it, they create their own memories.” 

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Many of Tomaso Albertini’s earliest 3D paintings started as trash-bound cardboard boxes behind New York City bodegas. The Italian artist has always been driven to think and paint outside the box. For him, art flows from the deepest wells of the soul. “Being an artist, you have to do it 24 hours a day,” he says. Much of his creative process occurs when he’s researching, visiting galleries and meeting other artists. “It’s important to be around other people who think like you, who think everything is possible and everything can be new,” he adds. 

When Tomaso Albertini moved to New York in 2015 with his wife, Elisabeth Del Pero, their two dogs and about $3,000 to their names, he discovered a collective of two dozen artists in a “dirty basement” in Manhattan. “All around me, I saw so many artists, and I wanted to do something that was totally different,” he says. Without money to invest in his art, Tomaso returned to a technique he had experimented with in Milan, creating three-dimensional art using cardboard and paint.

Seeing the stacks of discarded cardboard boxes outside the city’s bodegas, the artist thought about consumerism, its sharp reflection in New York City, and how the boxes perfectly represented society’s hunger for buying and acquiring things. Tomaso found his canvas. “Everything in the beginning was from the street,” he says. 

His early works drew from the world around him and from within, giving light to his struggles growing up in a tough neighborhood on the outskirts of Milan, and grappling with being an artist in a community where the profession was not respected. “My work before my son was born was very dark,” he says. After the arrival of his son in 2018, the artist began using brighter colors and infusing his work with themes of hope and renewal. “The hope for me is in nature,” he says. His 3D paintings often feature flowers, butterflies, leaves, the sun. “If you can see some kind of light, everything can change,” he adds. In 2021, he collaborated with eco-art organization Tarea on 40 pieces that emphasize the link between humans and nature, which Tomaso finds essential. Many of the Tarea pieces feature a half-human, half-ecological character, with butterflies for ears, flowers on the face and one eye, like Albertini’s grandfather had. “It’s something about my story and something about nature,” he says.

Any given 3D painting can take about 20 hours to complete. Tomaso Albertini has upgraded to using art-grade cardboard that is less likely to deteriorate. He cuts the material into triangles with scissors. At first, he’d cut and measure each triangle. Now, after nearly 10 years, “It’s almost instinct. I can do it with my eyes closed,” he says. Taking an idea from his sketchbook, he creates a rough sketch on a canvas before sculpting the triangle-cut cardboard onto the surface using a glue gun. He then paints the cardboard with acrylic, making “something between a sculpture and a painting.” Tomaso pays close attention to the cardboard’s angles and the light—“the most difficult part of the work,” he says.  “It’s like making a puzzle in 3D.” Every time, he experiments with the light—every inch of movement changes how the light hits the surface and how the color shows up.

Street art influences from his teenage fascination with graffiti in Italy seep through as spray-painted words that flow to him on the spot—perhaps it’s the lyric in a song he’s listening to or a line from a poem. The abstract nature of his sculptural paintings harkens to comic books. After high school, Tomaso attended the International School of Comics in Milan, where he learned about Italian Old Masters, like Michelangelo, Botticelli and Raphael, and their techniques. After three years of study, he spent a year creating abstract paintings, supporting himself by working at a bar at night and painting during the day. But he wasn’t fulfilled.

Tomaso Albertini moved to New York after his grandfather, his earliest supporter as an artist, passed away. Within two years, his work started gaining traction. In 2017, a Sotheby’s representative approached Tomaso about participating in Old Masters Meet the Street, a documentary and art exhibit, through which street artists were asked to recreate famous paintings. Tomaso reinterpreted fellow Italian Agnolo di Domenico del Mazziere’s Portrait of a Boy. He preserved the spirit of the painting while sharing his story in the work. In the piece, the boy’s shirt is replaced by figures from Tomaso’s life. “To me, the most beautiful part of the original work was the gaze and the intensity that the figure has,” he says.

The project catapulted his career. In part motivated by having a second kid, in part driven by the pandemic’s effect on New York’s art scene, the couple started considering a move to Naples, where Elisabeth’s mom lives. On a visit to town, Tomaso met with someone from Naples Art Institute and discussed the possibility of doing an artist-in-residency. The idea intrigued him and was the push the family needed to relocate. “Naples is changing in artistic direction,” he says, adding that he’s eager to be part of the shift. Elisabeth started working with STARability Foundation as their chief development officer in April; and in September, Tomaso began his eight-month residency at the Naples Art, where museumgoers can see him work almost daily. “The other day, a man was sitting in the couch in the studio for 45 minutes, talking about his life and how he felt so much in the painting,” Tomaso Albertini says. “He was almost crying—it made me almost cry, too. That’s the power of art.

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Naples artist Mary Day bends slender rattan reeds so their ends cross over and under, gently layering to form anthropomorphic sculptures. Like with the organic materials, Mary gently arcs her body as she weaves. “The broader gestures of my shoulders, arms and hands allow the rattan to become its own shape,” she explains as she molds the reeds to echo their original, curving forms found in nature.

At first glance, her mixed-media sculptures resemble curiously wispy baskets. Too fragile and laden with philosophy to be used as practical pieces, the interlaced tangles of thin, earth-toned reeds undulate and splay open into forms that echo the spreading shoots of plants, voluptuous thighs and slender arms, or the eyes and lips of a face. “The vessel form as a metaphorical container is an ongoing preoccupation for me,” Mary says. As neatly as she tucks the woven strands into each other, Mary also knits messages and philosophies into her works. She’s driven by a lifelong fascination with nature; the study of religion in the Neolithic era, when it’s believed people worshiped a monotheistic female deity; and the historic power of women. 

Born in Colombia and raised between Miami and the Caribbean, Mary was always aware of the natural world around her. “Growing up in subtropical environments gave me an early affinity for nature,” she says. “I consider my process an ongoing visual discourse with Mother Earth.” A film about Vincent van Gogh sparked a childhood interest in art, leading to a bachelor’s degree in art history and photography and a master’s degree in painting from Florida State University. After graduating, Mary spent decades developing a robust drawing practice, creating abstract, geometric images in charcoal, conte and various inks, while working as an art professor at the University of Nebraska and as an instructor in the Department of Visual Technology at Metropolitan Community College in Omaha. 

In 2010, inspired by the organic shapes in her drawings, Mary began creating woven works. “I wanted to see if I could make a three-dimensional equivalent of the linear marks and forms recorded through my drawing practice,” she says. The pieces, often resembling a panoply of gourds or women’s swelling hips and breasts, took a life of their own. Before long, her sculptures were exhibited in venues from Omaha’s Saint Cecilia Cathedral to Rutgers University to Museo de la Filatelia in Oaxaca, Mexico. In 2014, she installed large-scale sculptures in the Museum of Nebraska Art’s garden. Nestled into the surrounding vegetation, they tilted and shifted as the elements affected them, almost seeming to wilt in the Midwestern summer heat. 

Mary relocated to Southwest Florida in 2015 and launched smallwalls, a multimedia art studio in the Naples Art District, with her husband, printmaker Gary Day. Locally, her works have been featured in group exhibits at the Naples Botanical Garden, Naples Art Institute and Marco Island Center for the Arts. 

In her studio, Mary focuses on weaving as a practice emblematic of women’s communal power. “My work speaks to a matrilineal inheritance based in the earliest Neolithic village sites of Europe,” she says. She looks to the writings of Marija Gimbutas, a Lithuanian archaeologist and anthropologist whose findings suggest from around 7000 B.C. to 3500 B.C., prehistoric European communities worshiped a single female deity. “Her research continually influences my studio practice in terms of forms, symbols and techniques,” Mary says. In Mary’s drawings and sculptures, forms expand and taper in. The narrowing neck of a gourd could also be the nipped-in waist of the exaggerated hourglass figures often seen in Neolithic European sculptures.

[caption id="attachment_56964" align="aligncenter" width="850"] Mary shifted from drawing to weaving in 2010, inspired by the organic shapes in her sketches. She’s intentional with the dyes she uses for her rattan sculptures, opting for earthy shades that resemble skin tones. (Photo by Christina Bankson)[/caption]

To create her vessel-like sculptures, Mary soaks the rattan to make it more pliable. Standing to accommodate her sweeping arm movements, she weaves the reeds into the dominant shape, forming an armature. Then, she weaves in more rattan, using a traditional twining technique, which laces the perpendicular rattan through by alternately passing it over and under the armature strands. 

Before she begins the process, Mary dyes the rattan and lets it dry. The light beige material readily accepts the color, which she chooses with deliberate shades of rich, earthy brown that can sometimes give way to the bare color of the reeds. Using immersion dyes to stain the rattan is time-consuming, and the artist performs an elaborate dance, soaking, adding salt and rotating the coiled rattan in its dye bath every 15 to 20 minutes before adding soda ash, soaking the coils again and giving them a final wash in clean, running water. 

The result is like skin tones, with variations of different shades encapsulating light and dark—a poignant decision that reflects Mary’s desire to create artwork that can speak to anyone. The colors also help create a sense of the vessels’ human form, more so than if they were, say, dyed purple. “My vessels’ anthropomorphic qualities organically evolve through a synthesis of feeling, thinking and doing,” Mary says. “And I think they’re ultimately not only about humans or nature, but about humankind.”   

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Even before she became a mother, Fort Myers-based painter Grace Mikell Ramsey was captivated by the strength of women. “I’m interested in the rituals and experiences of being human, and the most magical are female,” she says. “Giving birth was the most empowering experience, getting to be part of the flow of history.” But motherhood was not without its challenges. When her daughter, Marigold, was born in 2017, Grace embraced the attachment parenting style and breastfed her for three and a half years. The closeness between mother and daughter was precious but overwhelming.

When Marigold was a few months old, Grace visited New Orleans, where she had earned a master of fine arts degree at Tulane University in the early 2010s. She asked some friends if they would be open to undressing for a photoshoot. Together, the women tried different poses, chatting about the unique demands of motherhood until one suggested they nurse each other. While Grace would often transpose photographs into a single composition, she only used a single image from this shoot. She loved the powerful message it evoked. In the finished painting, Latch (2019), women are realistically depicted with their bodies tangled on a rug, their skin cast in a greenish pall. The artwork points to the dissolution of selfhood involved in raising another human being and the essential bonds formed between female friends, especially mothers. “It just poured out of me,” Grace recalls. “It has a lot to do with the complexities of nurturing, what it looks like to give and give and give.”

The layered relationships between women have long influenced her work, in which photorealist figures are immersed in surreal, dreamlike landscapes. “I realized early on that I was interested in drawing and painting people,” Grace says. “But I also liked the idea that I could make a narrative painting. There’s something about the surreal language of dreams that is uncanny.”

As a teen, Grace took private art lessons from a woman in her small town. Rooted in fundamentals, the instructor had her spend an entire year drawing before Grace was even allowed to touch a paintbrush. During college, she pursued religious studies instead of art. Along the way, friends persuaded her to sign up for a drawing class. “That really changed everything,” Grace recalls. “It wasn’t just about how accurately you could draw from life.” Her professor unlocked the door for Grace to express herself, and her talent took flight. Later, while pursuing a master of fine arts, she began experimenting with more expressive styles.

Keep (2011), painted while Grace was at Tulane, shows three young women pricking their fingers with needles, as if about to swear a blood oath. In Feeding (2014), another sinister early painting, a woman solemnly presents her severed breast on a plate to a toddler, who greedily grasps a fork and steak knife. The macabre portrait is inspired by Saint Agatha, the Sicilian martyr and patron saint of breast cancer. Grace often draws from Old World Renaissance and Flemish primitive artists and their depictions of religious martyrdom. But Grace isn’t mired in darkness. “Riding that line between beauty and grotesque—I think it can be more impactful,” she says. She laughs often and is quick to acknowledge the joys of parenthood. Daughter (2020) embodies her sunnier outlook. Marigold’s face gazes skyward, enveloped in a cozy swirl of fabric, while rainbow-hued squirrels leap through the twilight sky. It is magical and innocent; it might almost have been made just to delight her little girl.

[caption id="attachment_55018" align="aligncenter" width="821"] [God Only Knows (2022), 46x32 inches, oil on canvas, courtesy Grace Mikell Ramsey][/caption]

Before motherhood, Grace would photograph subjects and do multiple sketches of the composition prior to creating a smaller study using acrylics to solidify the color palette and placement. The finished sketch was then photographed, digitally projected onto a bigger canvas and traced. “At that moment, I know a lot of what it’s going to look like, but I haven’t taken the study so far that I know every detail,” she says. As a new mom juggling a career as an assistant professor at Florida Gulf Coast University, making such laborious paintings became untenable.

In the precious few hours after Marigold and later her son, Cosmo, went to sleep, Grace would slip away to her home studio to paint. She began experimenting with creating imagined figures that function as symbolic representations. “I’ve adapted more of an intuitive approach,” Grace says. “It’s really fun to make a figure that I have in my head and put more of my energy into having a certain feeling instead of making it look a certain way.”

Her latest works, like God Only Knows (2022), still capture the psychological strangeness of her earlier paintings. A woman with green skin, her expression grave and tired, dips her breasts into a wooden barrel of brown liquid. In contrast to the weariness, the sky is golden and the woman radiates, her hair flowing behind her in lustrous waves. The juxtaposition combines the contradictions of motherhood, creating a perfect representation of how parenting feels much of the time. “The paintings I’m working on now feature a single woman going through some trial or tribulation,” Grace says. “I’m not interested in making paintings that are just saccharine or pretty. I believe in being honest, genuine and open. That’s the full scope of being a person.”   

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“You make one pour, and that drives the whole painting,” Naples Art District artist Richard Diedrich says, gesturing toward one of his paintings laying on a table. His careful manipulation of poured paint mimics the flow of water and how it coalesces. Richard’s highly abstracted paintings are ephemeral and often moody in color. Their translucent veils are interspersed with rivulets of texture—a far cry from the tight renderings Richard Diedrich created during his previous career as a lauded Atlanta architect and instructor at Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Richard Diedrich started painting as a graduate student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “The architecture school is within the school of fine arts,” he says. “So, we had five years of art with studying architecture. We had a watercolor professor just for the architects. I’d render all my projects in my career in watercolor.” After 34 years in the field, he sold his architecture firm in 2002 and returned to painting, focusing on the landscape surrounding his home on North Georgia’s Lake Burton. “I really liked the idea of what happened on the edge of the water,” he says. “You had this architectural necklace of the cottages and boathouses where the water meets the land.”

At first, he used watercolor to depict the lake and shoreline realistically. The more he painted, the more he removed visual details, like buildings and the surrounding mountains, until only water remained. He called the series Man on the Edge, speaking to humanity’s tendency to settle where the water meets the land. “If you’ve seen satellite photographs of the Earth at night, they dramatically show civilization along the edges of continents,” he says. “I’ve always loved those photographs because it makes that propensity so imminent.” 

Richard Diedrich lays his canvases flat and fluidly disperses paint across the surface to mimic water washing over land. Similar to how he’d adjust the pitch of a roof on a building, he gently tilts the primed canvas so the watercolors and water-based inks stream and ripple, often creating minuscule bodies of water all their own. He’ll then spray the canvas with water or blow across the wet paint, moving the pigments like wind shifting the tides. The finished paintings appear veil-like and pristine, while the edges reveal layers of thick, iridescent ink over watercolor, each vibrant drip soaking the canvas.

Richard moved to Naples in 2015, after visiting for architectural projects over the years, including designing clubhouses at The Club at Mediterra and Grey Oaks Country Club. He found himself captivated by the surrounding waterways. “It goes back to water being a source of travel,” he says. “Before the Tamiami Trail, the only way you could get to Naples was on the water.” To showcase his love for the region, Richard published his fifth book this year, Painting Naples Architecture, which documents significant historic, midcentury and contemporary homes in his dreamy realist watercolor style. The artist is represented locally at Joel Shapses Studio and recently worked with interior designer Judith Liegeois to create works on a larger scale—stretching as tall and wide as 6 feet—for her Naples gallery and showrooms.

Richard’s fascinated by the movement and effects of water on land, at sea and in the skies. His diptych Nature Benign, Nature Unleashed captures two extremes in Southwest Florida. In Nature Benign, washes of paint depict a calm horizon pierced by radiant sunlight—its palette pastoral and Bahamian. On the other hand, Nature Unleashed is dominated by a hulking, surging silver mass that recalls the region’s summer thunderheads. The physical action undertaken in each painting—the thinness of the pours and subtle tilting of the canvas in Benign versus the thickness of the paint and more aggressive manipulation of its movement in Unleashed—effectively contrasts the waterscapes’ stillness and voracity.

Richard’s paintings range in perspective. In some, viewers could be lying at the bottom of a lake, looking up at its murky surface, while others recall the pulled-back views of aerial maps. The former architect uses straight edges (tools used to draw blueprints in the days predating computer software) to create faint lines running through his pours. “They signify latitude, longitude and that man had to navigate the water,” he says. The viewer could alternatively be looking out toward a horizon, distant and bright enough to distill the water and its adjoining land into chromatic, textural strips. It’s this last point of view that Richard considers most crucial. “The medium is the message,” he says. “It’s really true in my case.” 

[ngg src="galleries" ids="334" display="basic_thumbnail"] 

Pictured above:

Richard Dietrich’s Red Horizon (2019), 36x36 inches, mixed media on canvas. Photographed by Louis Venne.

Gold Sky, Wedge Shore (2020), 36x36 inches, mixed media on canvas. Photographed by Louis Venne.

Richard Diedrich’s After Georgia (2020), 20x20 inches, mixed media on canvas. Photographed by Louis Venne.

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