Artist Christopher Still has an eye for history
Through richly detailed canvases, he hopes to remind beachgoers of the Florida that existed before development encroached.
By Lennie Bennett, Times Art Critic
Published June 24, 2007
IF YOU GO
Still on sale
A sale of Christopher Still's studies will be Oct. 27 at Sandpearl Resort, 500 Mandalay Ave., Clearwater Beach. For information about the sale, e-mail christopherstill@ij.net or go to www.christopherstill.com.
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TARPON SPRINGS - Christopher Still is voracious.
Oh, you will protest, not the self-effacing, enormously popular painter of elegant still lifes and historical panoramas. Not that quiet environmentalist who often adds, but never raises, his voice in conservation efforts.
Yes, all that and voracious, too.
In the best possible way an artist can be.
Though some of his fans spend tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of dollars to collect his work, Still is the true collector, with an enormous appetite for the life around him. He is a curator of animal and plant specimens, artifacts and objects.
Everything that best defines Still is coming together in a pair of works he is completing for the lobby of Sandpearl Resort, a multimillion-dollar hotel on Clearwater Beach being built by developer Mike Cheezem.
"Developer" will prompt the hoisting of red flags from other environmentalists, especially when associated with "beach." They were red flags for Still, 46, when he first met Cheezem in 2001. Cheezem wanted to display prints made from some of Still's paintings in the lobby of the Hampton Inn that JMC, his company, was building in downtown St. Petersburg.
"I was always drawn to his work, " Cheezem says. "I saw a publication with his work but couldn't afford originals for the Hampton Inn. I was aware he was very conservation-minded. I'm not sure exactly why he first agreed to talk to us. I think he became aware of our efforts to be environmentally responsible."
"Mike is a very special person, " Still says. "He has a lot of integrity. He's sensitive to conservation and trying to do something different as a developer."
Disclosure: I have known and liked Mike Cheezem for several decades and my brother is an executive with JMC.
About two years ago, Cheezem approached Still with an ambitious project: paintings for the public area of a 253-room luxury resort to be built on a pristine stretch of Clearwater Beach adjacent to a new 15-floor condominium tower, on the site of the old Clearwater Beach Hotel and not far from Caladesi Island State Park.
"I struggled with that, " said Still, who grew up in Clearwater exploring its coastline.
"I don't know what I thought about more people living on Clearwater Beach. I started remembering tourists with these rafts of sand dollars they collected. I felt those were my sand dollars and no one was telling them these were living creatures, to put them back in the water."
He was persuaded, he said, by knowledge that development was inevitable but in the right hands it could be more positive than negative. Sandpearl was being built with new, eco-friendly systems for elements such as its swimming pool and laundry, and there is a program to recycle construction debris. Still said he further believed he had the opportunity to use the paintings to remind all who saw them of the fragility of the natural area and the need to live in respectful coexistence.
So he proposed huge murals about Caladesi Island that would weave a narrative linking the past to the present, "a guide for people who go to Caladesi and see what most of Florida was like when I was a kid."
Cheezem told Still to do whatever he wanted.
"How many builders give you creative freedom to tell the story of a local place, to celebrate the region?" Still said.
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The artist, a visual memoirist, has used bits of the natural world the way Proust used a madeleine to look at times past. He goes further, though, tying them to the present, creating a landscape that is both grand and microcosmic, a world in grains of sand.
Now, about 18 months later, Still's Clearwater magnum opus is nearly finished.
Both murals portray the same small patch of Caladesi, one on the beach and the other just offshore, under a few feet of water. A great blue heron dominates the land scene; a young boy snorkeling dominates the marine scene. Their poses mimic each other, a compositional gesture that subtly links the paintings.
There are hundreds of smaller links. A pen shell lies horizontally on the sand, its occupant - a type of shellfish - long gone. Another pen shell is shown in its watery habitat anchored vertically to the sea bottom. The same with sand dollars. One is a bleached corpse, another is alive with color, carrying a tiny sand dollar crab on its underside.
A horseshoe crab crawls near the water line as a red knot, a small bird resembling a sea gull, flirts with the outgoing tide. Their connection is more obscure. The birds are seasonal visitors who stop in Florida on their way from the Arctic to the southern part of South America, one of the longest migration paths. They fatten up on the eggs laid by horseshoe crabs before leaving.
"There's this unique community here on the shoreline and just beyond. It's their version of family, " Still says. "They're all interdependent."
To reinforce the point, both paintings include a human family - mother, father, boy and girl. They are seen first walking on the beach and then wading and swimming in the water. (In that work, only the grownups' legs and torsos are visible.)
"Anyone who comes to that beach becomes a part of its history, " Still says. "There's this whole connectedness."
Still has included two of the most important people in Caladesi's 20th century history, Henry Scharrer, who settled on the island at the turn of the century, and his daughter, Myrtle, who grew up there. When she was in her 80s, Myrtle Scharrer Betz, now deceased, wrote a book about her life in the sometimes challenging but always loved paradise. She is portrayed as a little girl in Still's painting.
Water from high tide pools in front of father and daughter. Look closely and you will see the pools are shaped like a map of Caladesi as it was in 1926 when Myrtle was a child; a hurricane several years earlier had forged a pass that split the island, called at the time Hog Island, in two.
Still's visual time line includes Myrtle's husband, Herman Betz, and their daughter, Marion, in front of a cabin in the dunes. Walking on the beach is Marion Betz Thorp's daughter, Terry Fortner, and her husband, Bob.
A discarded room key from the old Clearwater Beach Hotel, now the site of Sandpearl, sits amid the shells in the foreground, labeled Room 122. Still said he believes it might be the only one that survived the hotel's demolition several years ago.
Almost everything is painted from life, with specimens Still collected. He researched the animals and plants for eight months before he picked up a brush.
Such specificity of detail will be lost on the casual observer. Still understands that and for those who want to know more about the paintings' content and context, Sandpearl will have printed materials available along with a video on the in-room television channel.
Fascinating minutiae and historical accuracy make a great documentary but don't guarantee good art. Still understands that, too.
"I have to make a good painting, " he says. "If I get so hung up on what's in the painting that it's not good on its own, then it's a failure."
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You don't need to know any of the backstories to appreciate them. Even unfinished, they're obviously good. Only an artist with Still's talent and classical training could pull off highly realistic works that appear straightforward and photographic but are really a complicated form of trompe l'oeil.
He employs Old Master techniques that distinguish all his paintings, including the most famous, a series of panels tracing Florida's history that hang in the Capitol in Tallahassee.
Still has painted and drawn since he was old enough to hold implements. He studied at local art centers and began showing his drawings at art shows in fifth grade. At $80 each, they always sold out. After high school, he got a degree from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts on a full scholarship, also taking classes in anatomy at a medical school and studying architecture. He traveled in Europe to see great art and apprentice with artists there.
"All the monumental art I saw involved mountains, " he says. "I acquired all these skills so I could come home and paint Florida the way it should be painted."
When he came home in the late 1980s, Still quickly established a following for his paintings, mostly landscapes and still lifes, or hybrids of the two containing scenes from Florida's past. He would produce only a handful yearly that he would unveil at a reception. Like the drawings from his youth, they all sold.
For the past several years, he has worked on commissions such as the one for Sandpearl, taking at least a year to finish them. He has several lined up that will take him through the next few years after these are done, he says.
He always creates preliminary studies of his commissioned works that he sells to the public. This year, about 30 studies from the Sandpearl project will be available (see box at right).
Though these new paintings look finished, Still will probably work on the 7- by 14-foot canvases until the resort's opening, scheduled for August. He continues to refine the composition. He even reworked the "frame, " an illusionistic surround simulating the crushed shells that will be on the walls from which both paintings will hang.
It's obsessive work. Voracious. And beautiful.
Lennie Bennett can be reached at (727) 893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com.