Christopher Still is painting a mural of life in Florida's Carysfort Reef. While his canvas is huge, so is his studio: He works underwater.
By CANDACE RONDEAUX
Published June 22, 2003
[Times photos: Scott Keeler]
When he’s not diving at Carysfort Reef, Still is in his Tarpon Springs studio. Here, he paints a Florida spiny lobster.
At sunset, Christopher Still paints on the dock of the Carysfort Reef Lighthouse. He spends his days working above and below water.
Tarpon Springs artist Christopher Still works underwater on the Carysfort Reef. A rubber glove that reaches inside the box allows him to paint small-scale studies that he will use in creating a mural commissioned by the state.
Three small paintings completed underwater dry on the floor of the 151-year-old Carysfort Reef Lighthouse, where Still has been allowed to camp.
A parrotfish at the Carysfort Reef. The species is one of the many fish in Still’s mural.
With his right hand in the box, Still begins painting a brain coral. “It’s like painting with a water balloon tied to your hand,” he says.
KEY LARGO - There is no sleep here. The waves steal his dreams.
So at 6 a.m., Christopher Still gets up and grabs his wide-brimmed straw sun hat. He eases down the steep ladder winding down the side of the Carysfort Reef Lighthouse. His head still buzzing with inspiration, he hurries to unpack his easel and paints. Got to get that sunrise on his brush.
"If I could just capture what's here," Still says, his voice trailing off along the light ocean breeze.
What's here are miles of stony brain corals, scissor-mouthed barracuda, wispy sea whips and wickedly beautiful sunrises. The Carysfort Reef is inhabited by hundreds of sea creatures, and the Tarpon Springs artist wants to paint them all. This morning he'll be going underwater, with his brush and paints, to do it, and with the sunrise providing perfect light.
Four years ago, the state awarded Still a $150,000 commission to paint Florida's history from its prehistoric dawnings to the roar and tumult of the Space Age. Nine of his murals now hang in the Florida House of Representatives.
About two years ago, he was awarded $120,000 for two additional murals. Now he is working on the second of these, a 131/2- by 5-foot painting of the lush, teeming Carysfort Reef. The reef mural and a painting of underwater life in a freshwater spring are Still's paean to Florida's watery history.
"It's an awesome responsibility," he says. "Our life is so short compared with the biological life of the state."
To show that life in all its intricacy, he designed a 60-pound waterproof paint box strong enough to withstand the pressure of deep water so he can sit at the bottom of the ocean for hours, painting everything that floats his way. Still's box has a miniature easel fixed a few inches beneath a clear panel inside a 2-foot-deep cube of heavy industrial plastic. A rubber glove that reaches inside the box allows him to paint small-scale studies of reef life while underwater. He breathes compressed air from a scuba tank.
"It's like painting with a water balloon tied to your hand," says Still, 42.
His pale blue eyes hunt the early summer light shimmering across the massive patches of reef beyond the lighthouse dock. His five-day scuba diving sojourn to Carysfort Reef is the second he has taken there in the past year. A traditional approach would have been to study photos of the reef and reel off hundreds of charcoal sketches before painting the mural.
But Still is a water baby. He grew up watching manatees swim behind the observation window at Homosassa Springs. All he ever wanted was to get on the other side of that glass.
"I have always liked staying underwater," Still says. "That was like a childhood dream. You know, like Jules Verne. I remember looking at all these engravings of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and I'd just get lost in them."
Painting underwater is his chance to do that. His childlike awe of the ocean has led him to spend the past two years studying the history and science of Florida's coral reefs. When he's not scuba diving out at Carysfort, he's in his studio, leafing through books on coral and sizing up a life-size model of a coral bed borrowed from the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary exhibit.
A stickler for precision and accuracy, Still spends days at a time fussing over the bend of a sea fan.
"If I orient these fans wrong in the mural so that they don't match water currents, then someone who knows coral is going to know I don't know what I'm doing," he says.
That's where Randy Runnels comes in handy. A Tampa oceanographer with a sweet Texas drawl and thick gingerbread-red mustache, he is Still's reef guru. He met Still at an art show 10 years ago and soon after invited him to visit the reef.
Without Runnels, gaining access to one of the nation's most protected marine environments would have been nearly impossible. But when Still was set to begin the reef mural, Runnels, 43, helped him get a permit from the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary and special permission from the Coast Guard to camp out at the 151-year-old lighthouse. His big dream is to transform the rusting hulk of a lighthouse into an observation station for marine scientists studying ways to preserve the reef's endangered ecosystem.
"There's just no way to duplicate the complexity of the reef," says Runnels, who manages the Department of Environmental Protection's Tampa Bay Aquatic and Buffer Preserves. "You can sit there for hours just looking at invertebrates and crustaceans and all that, and you still won't see everything."
But Still tries.
By midmorning, he has his scuba gear on and is set to dive. Runnels' friend and co-worker, Rose Poynor, and her husband Ray help him guide the paint box deep into the ocean. Eager to document his descent, the Poynors follow Still with an underwater camera, circling above him in full scuba gear as he steadies his watertight easel with one hand.
Still struggles to slip his hand into the green rubber glove fixed inside the air-tight chamber. His gaze fixes on a massive cluster of chunky corals in front of him. He swirls the needle-thin brush tip over tiny puddles of oil paint, each stroke a tiny victory over the raw physics of the fierce water pressure closing in on him.
Thirty feet beneath the surface, the water is riotous with sound and color. The sibilance of compressed air rising from Still's tank harmonizes with the unearthly crackling crunch of a parrotfish munching coral. Silvery white barracuda streak by like lightning. A bawdy gang of blue tangs whizzes over Still's shoulder.
Still kneels before his easel on the ocean bottom for hours at a time, surfacing only once or twice to switch air tanks. There is no time here. Only the ocean's ever-shifting spectrum of light and life. Miniature 6- by 4-inch studies of reef life slowly emerge beneath his brush as waves slip by overhead. Wave currents inform each movement of Still's hand. The tiny paintings are a sort of shorthand; each new color and shape Still encounters underwater will become part of his massive mural.
His trouble is choosing what to paint. Violet-veined sea fans wave seductively. Brown-sugar-colored elkhorn corals and electric-orange encrusting sponges jockey for his attention. Back in his Tarpon Springs studio, Still estimates more than 1,000 sea creatures will eventually wind up in the picture.
"I get overwhelmed," he explains as his eye sweeps over the giant canvas one afternoon. His brush moves gingerly over the creamy tail of a spiny lobster in the mural.
"I mean, I go down and start looking at the corals and everything starts coming at me."
But that won't stop him from painting underwater again. He plans to take a few more trips to other reefs in the Florida Keys before summer's end.
"There's nothing like sitting at the bottom of the ocean and watching whole worlds drift by," Still says.
