[female voiceover] Art Loft is brought to you by.

[male voiceover] Where there is freedom, there is expression.

The Florida Keys and Key West.

[female voiceover] And the Friends of South Florida PBS.

[host] Art Loft it's the pulse of what's happening in our own backyard as well as the taste of the arts across the United States.

In this episode a road trip to the Florida Keys.

You can live anywhere on the planet and do this style of art.

He's gorgeous.

Yep.

Yeah.

Put him down.

My name is Lisa Herman.

I'm a marine artist here in the Upper Keys and I'm the owner and operator of Gallery of the Arts.

The Keys is definitely an influence on my art hands down.

I mean you can't ask for a better color palette than what we have here.

I really like where the horizon line I'm just in love with it.

I mean you get to see it so often here and when you look at the horizon on the ocean it never looks the same.

There's something simple and you know, primitive about it.

It's cool and I think that's what brought me into the gyotaku process.

It's very straightforward.

It's very clean.

Gyotaku is very interesting.

Originally it started back in the 1800s in Japan and it was a way fishermen could record their catches basically before cameras existed.

And because of this interesting layout and how they recorded it it started to turn into its own form of art.

This is neat.

He's cute.

Each fish has their own little characteristics and personalities.

We're like this guy's little character.

He's missing a little part here and a little part there.

So each time I do it I get a little bit more familiar with the fish and I make sure I pull up all those little different dorsal fins in there to make sure their tails like, as fanned out as it can.

I try to capture the fish like as lit up and excited as it is in the wild.

This one's perfect sized.

I like to get a picture of the exact fish that I've printed so when I come back to the gallery I can make sure all of its little spots all of its eyes are exactly the way this one looked.

Some of the mutton snappers have really really cool teal like blue around their eyes.

And I always wanna make sure I wanna get it just right.

It's like their little signature.

Each fish that I do gyotaku prints of, 100% will be something that the everybody can share and eat.

I'm not ever going to take a fish that has just the purpose for printing.

It has to be utilized beyond that.

So when I am doing that, I'm thinking about you know, this fish we're going to eat it afterwards so I only use very non-toxic water-based acrylic paints.

I do it traditionally where I use a very very black acrylic paint and I always do the fish in black and when I pull it off after that, I do the embellishments.

Some clients want just the eye embellished.

Some clients want the whole fish embellished in color.

Some want it just black and white as is so there's a lot of different stages and ways you can and you can do this fish.

Every time you pull that paper off it's like a big surprise.

Yup.

Perfect.

As I was exploring doing the gyotaku on fish, I thought you know, it'd be really cool to do it on other nature.

One of my friends has a big, beautiful butterfly garden so I asked her if she ever finds any of the butterflies that passed on, didn't make it let me you know see if I can somehow make them live on forever and got my hands on a couple butterflies and they turned out magnificent.

I do use different inks instead of the paint.

The paint was a little bit thick on the butterfly so I use inks and now it's, I mean, I've tried dragonflies, bumblebees, different leaves, different seashells.

I'm always experimenting with different style canvases like I love my stretched white canvas but there's something exciting and challenging about painting on oyster shells.

I've painted on sand dollars, the swordfish and now doing the gyotaku is very very interesting where it's not your basic plan you know how to go about it.

Some different shells, some different bills, they kind of tell you what they want and they, you kind of explore what that shape is and what that can house for that specific piece of nature.

[host] Head to Instagram @LisaLee GalleryOfTheArts for more.

As a young girl, I would just stare then at this water, I called it diamond water.

It just resonated with me and it just, one of those things that I felt like I had to get onto a canvas or a panel.

My name is Elena Madden, and I am the owner of Elena Madden Studio Gallery in Islamoroda, Florida.

My parents were both artists.

I grew up in an artistic family.

I had an affinity for nature and painting.

I went to the Savannah College of Art and Design.

I married my SCAD sweetheart.

We would come on vacation to the Lower Keys and we'd camp for a couple of months and I would paint down here and I fell in love with the colors, the water.

This is my third location and I love it because I'm right in the middle of the arts district which is fantastic.

Oh my goodness.

It's really the light is what inspires me.

That's my main focus is light, energy, motion.

And the light here is unparalleled to any other light I've seen in all the other places I lived and the, which makes the color just amazing.

This may sound crazy, but every piece starts with a red background and build layer from there, transparent layers and so that creates this glow and underneath and so that's similar to what I'm imitating life here because you have that that light from below and above.

They're still evolving.

I'm constantly learning about and I love it.

You don't want to overwork it.

I never wanted to paint from photography because I assumed it would make it stiff so I don't use photography at all.

I want it to move so I have to so it's really from memory and it's fairly intuitive.

So I started this series about 22 years ago.

I was actually still in South Carolina when I did and I lived on a body of water and I would just do thumbnails and just paint for memory over and over.

I'd do small pieces and then I make them large.

What happened was I found my own rhythm.

So gradually get lighter and lighter and lighter until I'm satisfied with the light.

There's many facets of the, of my reflective series.

So I started with a pure pure series which is just a pure reflection of light and everything in that was around it.

And then I started with a horizon series that gave people a little bit of a point of where they are and it grounds them a little more.

It's a little more traditional than the other.

Then I did a still series with the glasses and that's also reflective and I really put away any type of type of photography with that as well and just kind of go in and they become more whimsical that way.

And so painting something that moves and then something that's still is a nice balance to keep it fresh and keep your hand and your mind bouncing between those two.

The figurative series it's a positive and negative study and it's a, as you can see some reflection coming through the figure.

Basically the concept is, you know it's a very feminine idea with the moon, the tides, water, and how we're all connected.

I want the viewer to feel what they feel.

I had one person say they came in the gallery that it looked like bubbles of love and I thought that was fantastic.

Funny it was a piece that I actually painted for my husband and so I named it amor because as I finished it you know, she said it looks like bubbles of love that's interesting that is for my husband for Valentine's day so it's one of my favorite pieces.

I love painting on the wood panel.

It is the, I prefer Birch.

I love the grain.

It's understated but it, at the same time it looks like it looks like water ripples.

So it doesn't have any bounce when you're painting like you do with canvas and the finished product it appears wet just like the subject so it works really nicely for me.

Really my goal if I can inspire people to see the world in a different way, bring a little joy.

I mean, it's been a dark year for everybody.

If I could distract them with little beauty and maybe let them see all the beautiful things we have around us, that that would be my goal.

My felt like, you know, my job would be done if I brought a little joy.

[host] Check out ElenaMadden.com for even more studies in light.

We were approached by our art patrons, John Padget and the late Jacob Dekker about a vision of bringing sculptures that had been created at the Art Students League in New York.

And so we thought, well we would love to bring big outdoor monumental sculpture to The Keys and it really goes along with our All-American road.

Their work gets to come and get a whole new audience here.

Something that we're constantly as the arts council trying to do is to integrate our geographically diverse county.

And we really thought about where could someone pull off?

Where was a great vista and each piece has sort of found its own home.

There's wonderful storytelling about this sculpture trail.

The first topic of our series was around the town square and community dialogue and community conversation.

So those are the pieces in Islamorada that are is everything between and fragments.

And then at Other Side Park is everyone breaks and stand tall, stand loud.

And then we have the art studio piece which is called leaves of grass, in Grimble Grove the wind tower and this beautiful bird on a big pedestal is at the airport and we feel like it's the gift that keeps giving because like the pyramid really brings all sorts of attention to Crane Point and this incredible environment here.

My name is James Emerson and I'm a multidisciplinary artist.

In general my artwork is largely focused on representation of the human condition.

This sculpture in particular was executed there was a theme of the public square.

So it's very much about exactly that, the sort of intersection of all of us, you know where we all meet.

It's designed to be entered into and it's sort of a panorama.

I've tried to build a place where people can bring what's inside of them into the sculpture as well you know?

And so that, I hope that people get that out of it.

They're part of it you know, all of those are real people.

They're all portraits done from life.

So they're all of us.

The title is red none.

Calling it red none was something that we learned when we came down here to do the first part of the installation.

As it's been explained to me is it's that it's a marker that helps bring you home.

The walls are on this, you know, 36 degree slope because of the science of optics and line, right?

The drawings have to actually be distorted in order to be in proper perspective for the viewer.

So it's like this, it's an incredibly difficult task that I sort of created for myself but I'm getting an opportunity to make all the elements of the piece better.

Aaron Bell is a wonderful artist from New York city.

It's a phenomenal piece.

Stand tall, stand loud is the name of it and is a very provocative piece that stands out against hatred, bigotry.

It's exactly what we like to do here is have these difficult conversations with great access to people passing by that are able to see this so you have a really inspirational quote from Martin Luther King at the base with these kinds of, you know, beautiful hands like they would be holding up the world when they hold up the world instead here they're holding up a noose and the noose has a cross through it standing against the hatred and prior to hurricane Irma the noose stood above and was sprocketed and geared down to a sail that was rotating through the chest.

And as a gust of wind flew by it causes the noose to spin up top, standing out that as long as this noose still spins hatred still exists and it's important that we continue to speak out against hatred and bigotry.

So that message just absolutely got me.

I still get goosebumps when we talk about it and as of last month, funding was secured with the Art Students League of New York city to make sure that we could bring this thing back to life because it's an honor to have it.

The three new pieces, that theme is around water and it wasn't just about water, the ocean water but water rising and do we have enough water?

There's just so many other themes that came forward that we thought connected with The Keys.

We have Moray and we have Gaya and wave hinge.

It was intended for the locals to certainly enjoy and interact with them on a daily basis but also for our tourists to understand how much of a culture of the arts and a history of the arts that the Florida Keys has.

[female voiceover] Head to KeysArts.com and click Florida Keys sculpture trail map to start your own journey.

Hi, my name's Jamie Mattingly.

I am Cassidy Fritz's fiance.

He started Washed Up Key West.

This is his woodshop.

What Cassidy does is he uses local tropical hardwood trees Cuban mahogany, if we can find Dade County pine, you know, from we'd get it from old houses, Jamaican Dogwood, woman's tongue.

He likes to take those, cut them into slabs and once they're dry and ready to go he makes dining room tables, coffee tables, serving boards, charcuterie boards.

What he likes to call functional art.

Art that people not only get to enjoy visually but can actually use.

He likes to push the boundaries on it so he's always looking for new and fun ways to use the wood or to mix the wood with resins or other mediums.

It's definitely an eclectic style.

You see a lot of the graffiti outside a lot of the very bright colors.

We try to bring some of that in, but at the same time he could be very minimal and islandy in his designs and, you know just finding a really fun way to marry the two of them together.

After Hurricane Irma happened down here a lot of big trees came down.

We actually helped salvage a lot of really old historic trees from around town.

One of them being the Shel Silverstein home which was destroyed by the giant banyan tree falling on top of it.

Now banyan trees are not normally a kind of tree that we would harvest to turn into furniture because it's not a hard woods, but we did grab some of the trees and made coasters out of them and, you know, Key West had sorta dubbed that banyan tree the giving tree.

It is a piece of Key West history and a piece of literary history and it's been a lot of fun to make.

It surprises some people to realize that we are super big tree lovers.

We do not advocate for taking down any trees unless they are a danger because of lean or rot damage.

But if that tree has to come down we want to be the ones to get in there and take that log and we let it dry out for about a year, year and a half.

He slices it into slabs.

We've got wood drying everywhere, all over the wood shop but also all over our house.

At home we probably have six or seven piles of wood just drying out right now.

Rather than watching these gorgeous pieces of wood go to waste we now get to let them live on and it's a really exciting part of the job.

Cassidy and I both have been extremely lucky throughout this entire pandemic.

We've decided that we really want to start using our businesses for good and giving back more than we've been able to in the past.

So we recently linked up with One Tree Planted which is an organization that will for every donation will plant a tree in your honor.

So we've decided that for every single piece that we sell at Washed Up, we're gonna have a tree planted.

December was the first month that we actually got to do it and we planted 78 trees.

We wanted to be able to start a collective and just keep giving homes to more and more artists.

So Debbie Fritz, Cassidy's mom, is Key West Island Art.

Debbie has done a lot of these really cool conch homes.

We'll show right around Key West and find really funky looking houses and then create miniatures of them.

Kelly Rasper is Concrete Ship Mark and Tile and she does a lot of macrame and fiber art.

She makes these really gorgeous unique earrings, gorgeous macrame and what we would like to say is like more modern macrame.

Nick Sotto from Made by Sotto is a fine gold and silver jeweler.

He's actually one of the only jewelers down here keeping alive the tradition of Cuban hoops which is you know the mixture of gold and white gold and like very intricate designs.

A couple of years ago at our old wood shop Cassidy had a 20 foot fence and he is he's always wanted to put up art walls to let artists come and do whatever they wanted, just have fun.

And if you walk around the shop, you'll see a lot of those walls that we had that kind of got us started.

What we hope to do for these artists is to give them a canvas to show off their skills so that other businesses around town that are looking for an artist to come do a mural will now see an example of their work.

Our goal is to create the stock island art district.

Stock Island is more than just where the shrimpers and the fishermen take their boats out.

It's an artistic, very creative, beautiful thriving business community.

[host] You can find all the latest designs on Instagram @WashedUpKeyWest.

My name is Alexa Morgan and I am the Director of Public Relations here at the Hemingway Home and Museum.

So when visitors come and enjoy the property they're already taking a step in time because we've tried our best to preserve when he was here in the 1930s.

So they still get a sense of Hemingway when they're visiting with us.

Our visitors are from every end of the spectrum.

They're history buffs, love Hemingway, read many of his books, or they've heard about all our cats.

Hemingway and Pauline, which was his second wife traveled to Key West to pick up a Ford Roadster that her uncle Gus purchased for them.

During that time, they stayed on the island and after a few weeks fell in love and decided to purchase a home of their own.

In that time, he had finished A Farewell to Arms and with that inspiration wanted to continue writing and being here so they found this property here.

It was not in the best shape so they had to renovate.

Pauline being a employee of Vogue was very into fashion and high-end details and when they were working on the renovation she kind of took the lead on that and imported a many glass chandeliers that she installed in the home along with re-tiling the bathrooms and things like that all those extra details.

This originally was the hayloft of the property and he had a catwalk from his bedroom that extended right here to this floor.

He turned this into his writing studio and would every morning come write, work, and then in the afternoon enjoyed the island life.

Even in this writing studio, we have one of his typewriters.

He had multiple typewriters.

This is just one of many of his.

While here in the writing studio he completed The Snows of Kilimanjaro, To Have and To Have Not, The Green Hills of Africa and many other of his short stories and other works.

With his writings I know like To Have and To Have Not was more heavy of like Key West characters, more inspired of what he would see and who he would interact with while here on the island.

When he wrote, Oh Man The Sea he was no longer living here but it was a lot of like the deep sea fishing that he was introduced to while living here.

So I think as throughout his travels and the people he meets and where he has lived has all been an inspiration for his works.

So right now we are offering a writing experience where guests can come on property and enjoy the writing studio, the home, and the gardens privately and maybe get sparked with some kind of inspiration to write their future novel or any kind of writing piece.

What's something we've never offered before and going to other museums and visiting, there's always some kind of behind the scenes or some kind of experience you can enjoy and everyone is always drawn to our writing studio.

So we thought, why not open it up for other writers?

We are opening the experience throughout the weekdays.

So they just have to inquire and make sure the date is available and we can book that for them.

Our first booking, it was actually a husband booking it for his wife as a birthday gift.

She is a up and coming author so he wanted to give her a spark of inspiration while they visit in The Keys.

[host] For more information, visit HemingwayHome.com.

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Find full episodes and segments on a brand new website artloftsfl.org and on YouTube at South Florida PBS.

[female voiceover] Art Loft is brought to you by.

[male voiceover] Where there is freedom there is expression, the Florida Keys and Key West.

[female voiceover] And the friends of South Florida PBS.