All About Florida.
My own outdoor painting experiments in Florida, plus my introduction to the artist Jane Peterson.
Hello friends,
Welcome to this latest installment of my monthly newsletter. My objective with this newsletter is to show you art that I’ve made and other art that I’ve seen and am inspired by.
Read on to learn more about paintings I worked on outdoors during a month-long stay in Florida, plus some details I’ve been reading about the 20th century painter Jane Peterson, who I first learned about while visiting a Florida museum.
I updated my website with several new paintings in the past few weeks - take a look!
FLORIDA PAINTINGS
I recently finished my own month-long “residency” in Florida, from mid-February to mid-March. Ok, it wasn’t a real artist's residency, but having had the good fortune to stay there for four weeks working remotely with my husband was certainly more substantial than a vacation. We started traveling to Florida for an annual four-week-stretch three years ago, in 2022 when the pandemic had eased up but remote work was still the norm due to omicron. We were fortunate to keep up this routine in 2023 and now 2024 as well. The past two years we went back to St. Petersburg, a not-so-hidden gem on Florida’s gulf coast.
In four weeks’ time I worked on 12 small paintings, all inspired by various locations in the St. Petersburg area. It had been a few months since I painted outside. And I added a couple of new colors to my limited palette since then, but otherwise, the process felt familiar and fun. (For those who have interest, I added sap green, quinacridone red, and ivory black, and paint with 9 colors altogether.)
My first stop was Honeymoon Island State Park where I hiked around with my paints for more than an hour before settling on a view to paint. The main reason for going to this area was to hike the trails, and painting was going to be a bonus. We saw several ospreys, Bald Eagles, and armadillos, but missed out on the rattlesnakes which the area is also known for. Probably for the best.
I also painted a couple of times in the St. Petersburg neighborhood where we stayed. I wanted to paint more palm trees, and there are plenty to choose from here. We were a short walk from Crescent Lake Park, which is a city park not far from the downtown area. The lake is quite large and attracts a wide variety of birds, perhaps most notably large pelicans.
We keep going back to Florida for the nature, and within the city limits found another large park, Boyd Hill Nature Preserve. This park features a large lake and many forest trails with live oak trees covered in Spanish moss, slash pine, and palmetto trees. We saw one (new to me) snake, the Eastern Rat Snake, which is a bright orangey-brown color, and not poisonous.
You could say most of Florida is one large botanical garden, but there is also an official botanical garden near St. Pete. I painted there, where we also saw baby alligators. Their mother was mostly submerged in water nearby.
I took my easel to Sunset Beach one Sunday. It was really a perfect beach day, meaning that there was very little wind, strong sun, and even though the water was on the cool side for the locals, it felt fine to me.
Check out a few more paintings that I created outdoors, and a few smaller works on paper that I made from photos as I was cleaning up the paints on my palette and preparing to pack the car to head home. Minus the works on paper, I painted on 8 x 10 Ampersand hardboard, which I primed beforehand at home.
JANE PETERSON
One of my favorite paintings at the Harn Museum of Art on the campus of the University of Florida was by Jane Peterson, called “Flowering Grapefruit.” This painting is all about the many shadows the leaves cast on each other, and upon the ripening fruit. The painting was originally part of Samuel H. and Roberta T. Vickers’s private collection of Florida art. In 2020, the couple donated about 1,200 pieces of their Florida art to the museum, which they had collected for over 40 years. It’s surely the largest single collection of Florida-themed art, which includes pieces made between the early nineteenth and mid twentieth centuries. When I visited the Harn museum toward the end of February, the current exhibition included about 50 paintings from the Vickers’s collection.
Peterson was born in Elgin, Illinois, in 1876, and without any formal art training during childhood, was accepted to Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute in 1901. She went on to study painting at the Manhattan Art Students League. Like so many professional artists of her time, Peterson traveled extensively throughout Europe, seeing and associating with several other important artistic types, including Joaquin Sorolla in Madrid (who I wrote about last summer), and American writer Gertrude Stein who lived in Paris. (Perhaps a story for another time, but I also did some reading about Stein’s famous art collection. The apartment in Paris which she shared with her brother was a common meeting point for many of the 20th century’s greatest artists, writers, and musicians, including Peterson who lived very close by). Peterson lived well into her 80s, passing away in 1965.
Peterson painted a wide variety of subject matter including scenes from Italy, Turkey, Florida, New York, and Massachusetts. This scene from Gloucester, Massachusetts, is another one of her well-known paintings.
And you can see one more Gloucester painting in this video clip from The Antiques Roadshow. I’ll keep an eye out for more Jane Peterson in New England museums.
Thanks for reading this far! And thanks for subscribing to my newsletter. I’ll send out another post in mid-April.
Your paintings are lovely. I enjoy reading about your travels. mac