Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Everything comes with a story

Margaret Conte has made a home amid works of art, including sculpture and collages of her own making.

By ELIZABETH BETTENDORF
Published September 22, 2006

BRANDON - Artist Margaret Conte's cozy 1970s Florida house on a still rural street in Brandon has been called "The Magic Cottage."

It's easy to see why.

Peacocks strut through the yard, Paso Fino horses graze in a pasture across the street and dawn still brings the crow of roosters.

Inside the home that Conte, 76, shares with her husband, Carl, 80, paintings, pottery and artwork by an eclectic melange of Florida artists fill the rooms and quilt the walls.

"My grandsons once said, 'Grandma, don't you think it's too busy in here,' " Conte explains with a laugh. "But everything is used and comes with a story."

That includes the 9-foot lime-green sofa with matching ottoman found through a newspaper classified ad, the large, batik-style wall hanging once used as a school display by a Crayola crayon salesman and the antique children's chair snagged from a thrift store.

Though the Contes have renovated and flipped many houses over the years, it's a place Margaret Conte has no intention of leaving.

"Unless of course," she says a little wryly, "My Palatka holly trees die."

Brandon may be booming, but this small, 1970s development not far from Bell Shoals Road remains an enclave that hearkens back to the area's Old Florida roots.

Tall trees hover around the little house like loving relatives. Conte's beloved holly trees shade the front yard, oaks tower in back.

An enclosed porch holds her tall sculpture, often made of discarded pieces of wood. They typically depict unusual women who come wearing built-in curio boxes and dreamy quotes.

Conte's women wear costume jewelry, old photos, found objects, wire and other cool stuff that Conte stockpiles in neatly organized jars and containers in her garage studio.

She then gives them words through her hand-scrawled messages, usually inspired by bits of a song, a snatch of TV dialogue, a quote on a billboard.

"All of my women have stories. But when I first started to make them, they didn't have stories. The stories came later," she says.

Her style is bohemian-flower child, profound, spiritual, though not religious. Many of her women wear wings and gold halos (she calls them auras) reminiscent of Russian icons.

"I love hippie, and I love old," jokes Conte, who belongs to the local women artists' group, Brava. Conte, whose work can be seen at the Mermaid's Slipper in Ybor City, studied art at Hillsborough Community College, the University of South Florida and the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina.

Her collages have a similar feel, though they are deeply connected to Florida, incorporating pictures of early Floridians (including one of Conte's aunts who helped raise her in a matriarchal household made up of her mother and a gaggle of elderly relatives).

"They took turns reading aloud Gone With the Wind," recalls Conte, a sixth-generation Floridian, who was born near Starke and traces her family's roots to French settlers in 1700s St. Augustine.

Her husband, Carl, is a retired Tampa firefighter, family cook and gardener, who still works as a school crossing guard (just for fun). He jokes about how he just made $9.50 "helping the children" and standing in the sun.

"I've tried not working," he says. "But I can't stand it."

Early on a Tuesday afternoon, he made a batch of spaghetti sauce for dinner and the air was still fragrant with cooking.

Out in the back yard, a visitor could see his vegetable garden and small patch of pineapples, something he shrugged off as a mere shadow of previous gardens. Last year, he underwent triple bypass surgery, which slowed him down some, but not a lot.

For more than two decades Margaret and Carl Conte bought, refurbished and flipped 25 houses in their spare time. They also raised a family, and Margaret Conte didn't start making her art until middle age, when she first enrolled in a drawing class at HCC (after transferring out of a typing class, which she despised).

She worked in clay for a while, then moved to sculpture and more recently to collage, though she still creates plenty of wooden sculpture. She never plans to slow down, she says.

Making art nourishes her soul and makes her heart pump faster.

"It's all a result of something I hear or see," she says of her sculpture. "And they all speak differently to everyone."

Elizabeth Bettendorf can be reached at ebettendorf@hotmail.com.

[Last modified September 20, 2006, 12:55:37]