[announcer] Art Loft is brought to you by.

[announcer 2] Where there is freedom, there is expression.

The Florida Keys and Key West.

[announcer] The Miami-Dade County Tourist Development Council, The Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County mayor, and the Board of County Commissioners and the Friends of South Florida PBS.

[narrator] Art loft.

It's the pulse of what's happening in our own backyard, as well as a taste of the arts across the United States.

In this episode, we head to the Florida Keys for an artful journey through paradise.

There is no bending.

So the illusion is that no matter how I explain to people that everything is built up in carved, they can't get it outta their head that it's not bent.

But it's not, it's carved.

And that means I've won because that's what I'm trying to do is create something that is so naturally flowing.

They can't stop believing it.

My name's Derrick Crossland.

I'm a fine arts sculptor.

I sculpt in wood.

And the materials I use are Russian Baltic Birch, which is a laminate that I build the sculptures up and then carve them into these fluid shapes.

Most of the creations are kind of built around foundation of waves in two different waves.

Like the literal wave, like a sound wave is in each part of my pieces of art.

There's always almost a perfect sign wave right in the artwork that's hidden kind of in the back.

But that's part of the flu of the shape is the way that that design is in there already.

And then the other part of the sculpture is more of the abstract like water sort of movement that's going over the top of that wave.

And then when you blend those two together, you get this fluid movement of the shape.

I've been an artist in my bones from when I was just a little kid.

I've been doing artwork and crafty things.

And when I got through with my career in being a general contractor, I decided to build the shapes up.

And with all my experience from what I was, which was a master cabinet builder, I knew which wood I wanted to use, and that was Russian Baltic Birch, which is a laminate product.

So I built the shapes and then carved them.

And what I learned real quick after doing this is the lines showing through.

When you carve through the layers, it gives you like a really accurate depiction of what you're seeing.

And it's the same as topography on a map.

It shows you the the valleys and it shows you the high points.

It also, besides that, our eyes, when we're looking at something that has lines in it like that, our eyes are following the lines.

And when you're following those lines, it almost gives movement to the figure you're looking at.

I lay these drawings out, draw the blue line on the wood, draw the other lines, cover this piece out, cut it all out, then glue the pieces up.

And then eventually all six layers are glued on top of one another, and you have your shape.

You have your rough shape.

And that's it.

Extremely rough shape.

And then going through the process from the very roughest tools to get rid of the bulk, and then going down a layer of steps to get rid of the rougher to smoother areas.

And so you're using a carbide teeth tools to start, and then you're using really rough grits of grinder stuff to get it smoother.

Then you get into the sandpapers and you work your way down.

Each of these started out as like a six inch sketch.

So I come up with an idea, like let's take example the shark.

The shark's one of my favorite sculptures and creations.

Just in a couple quick lines, I had had this image of what I wanted to do.

And it's almost exactly what the shark looks like today.

With just a couple of brief hand movements, and I had this sculpted.

I have a color palette that covers a lot of different stains.

This just natural wood stains.

So I use different tones of grays and some earth tones, but then I have quite a few other techniques to get these blues in there.

And I'm using aniline dyes when I do that.

I feel like I've had the freedom to express myself, making these sculptures, I think is the best thing I've done in my career.

I love this art world.

Almost every artist out there supports each other.

We're all happy for each other's success.

There's no dog eat dog sort of thing out there.

It's all positive.

So it's a great place to be.

[narrator] You can follow Crossland's work online at derekcrossland.com.

Growing up in England, it's mainly gray, raining and cold.

So moving here, I really think it kind of did fuel my drive for painting.

Just the amount of color here, the greens, the turquoise of the ocean.

If you go out on the reef, you see the tropical, colorful parrot fish and stuff like that.

So the colors here are very inspiring for my art.

And I think that's probably one of the reasons that I started painting and using acrylic paint, cause I moved to Florida.

Everything's very colorful I had to move from pencil basically.

My name's Jack Kelly.

I am a marine life artist based in Islamorada, Florida.

So I've really been drawing, doing art my whole life.

My dad was an art teacher at high school, at a high school in England.

So he kind of taught me everything I know basically.

Now that I work in Marine Science with marine animals, it just does inspire me every day.

I work with the same individuals.

I have about 20 animals that I work with of varying marine species.

Seeing them everyday, it's just become so easy to paint them because I just see their faces everyday.

Put the colors, all the little details on them, they all have their own little personality.

Some of them are very nice, some of them are kind of jerks, but I love them all.

I'm just extremely passionate about the ocean and marine life and all my paintings are made with love for the ocean.

If I'm at work, I'll see one of the turtles at specific angles or something like that.

And I think to myself, "That would look really good in the painting.

I would do a really rough sketch of it on my phone.

So I use an app on there where you can like paint and I'll just do it really rough, like what I'm picturing in my head.

So I don't forget it basically.

So I'll just do like blues for the ocean, a turtle and just whip my finger doing it.

And then I'll take that home.

I'll usually get a piece of paper and then draw it out what I drew on my phone with all the colors and stuff like that.

And then I'll start doing it on canvas.

I work with three different crocodilians at Theater of the Sea.

I work with two American alligators and an American crocodile as well.

Now part of my job is training these animals.

They all rescues.

They all have some kind of medical condition where they wouldn't survive out in the wild.

So they do need to be trained in certain things like ultrasounds, blood draws, stuff like that.

One thing we do with our alligators is we have trained them to paint.

They hold the paintbrush in their mouth.

We hold a canvas up and we'll say paint, and they'll just move their head around.

They're really messy painting on the canvas.

This is Piper's work.

It's kind of abstract and messy.

kinda like Pollock.

But what I started doing was painting portraits on top of these paintings.

So I would get a photo of Piper from a perfect angle that I liked, and then just kind of paint his portrait over his own painting.

So it's kind of like a collaborative painting between me and the alligator.

This is a commission of a Western lowland gorilla and his name is Timmy.

So it's commissioned by his trainer to do a little portrait of him.

This is his painting in the background.

I guess those were his favorite colors, but yeah, she wanted him eating a sweet potato.

He's a talented artist, kind of like Piper.

It's just so different painting fur to what I usually paint, which is reptiles like turtles or fish.

It's just a lot more intricate, but it's really fun.

[narrator] Follow him on Instagram @JackKellyArt and online at JackKellyArt.com.

I thought after I was here a year or two, that maybe I would actually get bored with the changing sunsets and sunrises.

You know, it's just unbelievable, these sunsets.

It never gets old for me.

And then honestly, sometimes it does inspire me to get out my paints.

Sometimes that very evening, I'll just see something and say, "You know what I haven't done in a while?

I haven't done any really funky lavender clouds, against the bright orange.

So I'm gonna try that one out."

So yeah, sometimes it sets me on the path to getting out the paints.

Shannon Wiley, I'm an art teacher and a artist.

I went to Florida State University where I double majored in Studio Art and Art Education.

And then I found my way back to South Florida, living in Stuart, Florida for about 11 years.

And then we lived in Vero Beach for a few years and then an opportunity presented itself after hurricane Irma to move down here to the Keys.

I had interviewed for a position at Stanley Switlik Elementary, and they offered me the position right away.

This is my 16th year teaching art.

And I really enjoy the act of teaching something that I love and being a practicing artist.

It always blend itself well.

I think that the kids really benefit from having that as part of their daily routine, their weekly routine, having the ability to express themselves, have some fun with art.

It blends itself well to it that I'm busy as an artist all the time.

And I think the kids really enjoy that.

Seeing it put into practice in front of them.

Even to this day, I'm still doing both, you know, juggling between educating people in the arts while also doing my thing, selling my work and having fun painting and yeah, building the portfolio year by year.

I jump around everything from glass etching to large scale murals that I've always enjoyed doing.

I've been fortunate enough to be able to scale things to a large scale.

That's been a blessing.

I've never had any difficulty scaling things up to a sometimes large than life scale.

I've never had to use the grid system or projectors or anything.

I've just had the ability to conceptualize things large.

I usually will not even chalk it out.

Occasionally I'll use chalk, but generally speaking, I'll just thin down paint, like acrylic latex paint, and then sketch it out directly onto the wall just with thin down paint.

And then make adjustments and things like that.

On the bigger pieces, it means getting down off the ladder or lowering the lift down and walking across the parking lot to look back at the building.

On some of those bigger ones, it's a little trickier and quite time consuming.

When I get tired to doing one thing, I just try something else.

For instance, I'll jump into doing some landscapes or waterfowl and I'll get on a bird kick.

Last year, I got into doing black Gesso canvases and doing a lot of dark background pieces.

Then on swordfish bills.

I had the opportunity with a friend of mine, Archie Jost, who caught for 40 years long lining out of Gloucester.

He caught thousands of swordfish.

And so he supplies me with the swordfish bills that I sand down, bleach out, and paint.

And I got into doing that for a while too.

I was very fortunate that I had many, many teachers over the years that were a great influence on me that inspired me to want to be a teacher.

When people joke, "What did you always want to be?"

I'm like, "An artist and an art teacher."

As far back as I can remember.

So yeah.

Ira Margolis, my fourth grade teacher at Addison Mizner Elementary School, my older brother, Chris, who's also a practicing artist.

We both had him as our teacher and he was a busy artist doing his thing, still is to this day.

And yeah.

It kind of planted the seed all the way back in the fourth grade.

And I kind of ran with it from that point on, even bought one of his paintings years later, Ira Margolis.

Yeah.

[narrator] Follow Shannon's art on Instagram @ShannonPWiley.

The ticket is all in the knife .

If it's not, if you break the blade, just toss it, get a new one.

But yeah.

So then I hand cut everything out went little tiny cut at a time, and then when I'm done, I flip it over you see what you've made?

Hi, my name's Lucy Hawk.

I'm a paper cutting artist based on Stock Island, Florida.

So I hand draw all of my pieces on blank piece of paper.

So I take just a solid piece of paper and I draw out all my designs in reverse.

And then I cut them out with a knife, similar to a scaffold, like a surgeon when you use like an X-Acto knife.

Once everything's cut out, I flip the piece over and you can't see my design anymore.

So if you were to look at any of my designs on the back, you would actually see my pencil drawings.

I first came to the Keys when I was in college to work at a summer camp, and totally fell in love with the environment down here, the weather, the people, the mangrove trees really just caught me as being the most exotic plants ever.

And then I came back, and then I came back again, and then I made the full jump right before Irma.

So I've been here full time ever since.

So I had never even seen paper cutting and an artist that was doing a residency program downtown held a class in 2018, a 101 introduction to paper cutting class.

And that's how I first learned about it.

I was not selling art at the time and was like, "Oh, this looks fun."

Like, "I wanna go try out this class."

And I completely fell in love with it, got the list of materials from the artist and went ordered everything that night and really fell in love with the medium.

It is very time consuming.

So like this piece here, I think drawing it alone took like five to 10 hours just because of its sheer scale.

And then cutting it took an additional like 50 or 60 hours.

You know, just very slow taking your time.

It's not a medium where you can say, "I need to make this painting really fast.

Do it really quick."

It's not a medium that you can do that.

First of all, your hand will die.

But physically, it's taxing.

It's surprisingly a very physical medium on your hands, your shoulders, your body.

But yeah, it does take a while, but I do get into a meditative state.

So I have a gallery in studio on Stock Island that I co-founded with another artist, Barbara Sage.

And that's where my working studio is.

We decided to go in together instead of just one of us getting this space and open up our own like working studios that you could go through and purchase artwork as well.

And along that process, we were like, "Oh, I guess we should have like a uniformed name."

And Barb had the great idea of Sacred Space.

And we just loved that.

Because as artists, when you're creating and where you're creating should be a sacred space and it should be really special.

We have 16 local female artists.

Everything's different.

We try not to have two artists that do the same thing.

I'm Barb Sage.

And I'm also one of the owners of Sacred Space.

Everything just kind of fell into place right when everything was closing for COVID.

And the next thing we knew, we were opening a gallery.

Most of the artists weren't working at that time.

So we started carrying other artists and slowly but surely we started carrying more and more that were all female.

And that kind of became our thing.

We are so fortunate.

Most of our clienteles are local, and they're so supportive.

We do art classes.

And so that's another way that we really kind of try to connect and get people who maybe aren't comfortable creating out of their comfort zone and trying something new.

It is crazy to me how excited to people are over the classes.

Any artist on the island that wants to teach a class, we will open the space for at night so that they can teach the classes.

We have artists like Tammy that does our pottery.

Always has like a two day class going on.

Jenna that does all of our glasswork.

She's always doing a class.

I do some of the resin classes here, Lucy does some of the paper cutting classes.

Anybody that's interested, we really try to encourage that.

So I do all of the bright-colored pieces, all of the original whimsy pieces that are all hand drawn, hand painted.

They all have a resin top coat so that they can go outside.

Then also do resin work where like the tables and a lot of the resin waves I have throughout.

And I'm always trying different things.

So I always joke that my work is either bright or inappropriate.

So I do have a whole line of like inappropriate fun, in the greeting cards, stickers, bags, things like that.

So it makes me happy that people down here really have a sense of humor, and everybody knows somebody that's gonna appreciate that.

I mean, we all have that friend.

I don't know if I could get away with it in normal places, but I definitely get away with it down here.

[narrator] Find them all on Instagram, Barbs @WhimsyKeyWest, Lucy's @LucyHawkArt, and you'll find the gallery @SacredSpaceKeyWest.

These are the pieces of bone.

This is what they look like when they come out of the fire.

Some of them come out so beautiful that I can't bring myself to crush them.

So I'll probably save that one.

But for the most part, they just come out like this and they're pretty breakable, they're pretty delicate that just can kind of be chipped away.

My name is Tory Mata.

I am a visual artist.

I have primarily been a painter over my career, but recently have expanded to include sculptural items, found object assemblage, handmade papers.

So the piece itself becomes integral to the meaning as opposed to painting on a surface that becomes obliterated.

I started wanting to put the meaning into the paper itself and into as much of the finished piece as I could.

So I've transitioned to making a lot of my own pigments ground by hand from bone, in some cases, and the substrate itself.

So the handmade paper, in some case is worn bed linens that bring their own meaning to it.

So my process as a whole has evolved to really be about exploration.

So for example, the series Dream Home that I have was based around antique roof tiles to finding these pieces that have so much history and life into them.

And I think that things like time being a necessary element, that it's not something that just can be made overnight.

That this required years of weather and wear to get it to a place where it is.

And then how can I kind of reveal that and show that.

So the pieces kind of change.

Specifically for this series, Elegy that's behind me, it really became about my sister's passing, which was five years ago.

And so that really was kind of the catalyst for this work to evolve.

And so the bed linens, that's my own personal way into this work, but that it becomes universal to anyone about loss on any level.

The bed linens are so intimate and they're worn.

These are used linen.

So you can't get more intimate than that.

And that's really what I wanted to bring into the work was just that closeness and that intimacy of this process.

Death, yes.

But there's so much in there.

There's so much nuance when you're in that moment.

And so to be able to kind of explore that moment, I wanted to kind of take away as much as possible of even my own mark making was much less interested with what I had to say.

So that kind of more and more got less and less.

Cause it just wasn't necessary, you know.

The materials, the bone pigment coming together with and within the paper making process was really where all the magic was happening.

My work as an abstract painter was definitely landscape-influenced.

And even kind of subconsciously when I came here, I noticed that a shift to brighter colors.

And the horizon line was always kind of a prominent part in my pieces.

I used to say that they're landscape-influenced.

So I'm kind of using the language of landscape, but not at all kind of representationally.

More recently, I just felt the need to shed even color, which was basically the core of my work before was color.

and that's essentially gone except for kind of the neutral tones of the natural materials that I'm working with.

So it's kind of a massive shift.

It feels to me anyway.

But I think that kind of where the spaciousness was coming in more literally before with this landscape feel.

I have shifted that to trying to find that spaciousness in a more metaphoric level where you know that there's still that kind of, I think that's probably a key element to what I try to do is to evoke that spaciousness, whether it's in observation or something more literal.

And so I think no matter what my works are, there's some emotion that has moved me.

That from an old roof tile, something, all the history, the things that then get papered over and you know, how to reveal the imperfections in the history and things that have been damaged or harmed that are actually beautiful.

And so so much of it is about that emotionality and how can I convey that.

[narrator] Follow Tory Mata on Instagram @ToriMataStudio and tag us on Instagram with your art finds in the Florida Keys @artloftsfl.

Find full episodes, segments and more at artloftsfl.org and on YouTube at South Florida PBS.

[announcer] Art loft is brought to you by.

[announcer 2] Where there is freedom, there is expression.

The Florida Keys and Key West.

[announcer] The Miami-Dade County Tourist Development Council, the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade county mayor, and the Board of County Commissioners and the Friends of South Florida PBS.