Dunedin Florida Archives

Florida Artists and Studios- Carol Sackman and Blake White’s Mosaic House of Dunedin

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Dunedin, Dunedin, Florida Art Shows, Florida Travel, Glasswork, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Pinellas County, Places to Visit, Sculptors / Sculpture

Nov 142023

This past weekend was Studio Waltz, an annual artist studio tour that takes place around Dunedin and Palm Harbor. One of the stops was The Mosaic House of Dunedin.

Carol Sackman and Blake White’s magical home has so much going on you almost don’t know where to look first. The couple teach classes from November thru April and can be contacted for tours of their home.

The Mosaic House was also featured in a gallery exhibition at the Dunedin Fine Art Center last year.

Spotted while at their home was a mural, pictured below, by former local artist Jennifer Kosharek, pictured below. She recently relocated to Alaska.

Florida Art Shows- Dunedin City Hall Grand Opening

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Ceramic Art, Collage, Conceptual Art, Dunedin, Fiber Arts, Florida Art Shows, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Public Art, Sculptors / Sculpture

May 242023

Rachel Ratcliff, “Roll of the Kaleidoscope”, 2021, acrylic on canvas

Richard Logan “Sea Oats”, 2022, photographic transfer on metal with etched glass

Steven Spathelf, “Orange Blossom”, 2022, acrylic on canvas

This past Friday the city of Dunedin, Florida, celebrated the opening of its new City Hall. As part of the celebration, the building and all of its offices were open to the public. It was the first opportunity to see all the wonderful art by Florida artists- selected and commissioned by Elizabeth Brincklow.

Pictured above are works by Rachel Ratcliff (wave painting) and Richard Logan (photography). The third work is by Steven Spathelf whose oranges can be seen adorning buildings and homes all around town.

Scroll through the pages below to see the other works on view.

Florida Art Shows- Christopher Skura at Dunedin Fine Arts Center

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Drawing, Dunedin, Florida Art Shows, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Pinellas County, Sculptors / Sculpture

Feb 252023

Christopher Skura, “Keep the Dream from Ending”, 2022

Christopher Skura, “Keep the Dream from Ending”, 2022 (detail)

Christopher Skura “Sketchbook Drawings”

Christopher Skura, “The Turnaround”, 2021; “Sketchbook Drawings”; “Head Cult”, 2022

Christopher Skura, “Story Bored (Cast of Characters)”, 2021

Christopher Skura, “Gob Stopper”, 2018

Christopher Skura’s exhibition The Beginner’s Mind (starting over after Covid) at Dunedin Fine Art Center is an interesting selection of his drawings, paintings and sculpture.

The artist’s statement on his work from the gallery wall-

Working in my Woodstock, NY studio during the 2020 Covid pandemic influenced my creative process by making my working method more direct and immediate. I have begun a routine of drawing everyday in sketchbooks. Out of these small drawings have come many sculptural ideas. Each imagined form serves as a kind of placeholder and represents someone we have lost. Drawing quickly with paint marker, my natural, hardwired shapes have become more pronounced. The goal is to work with a “beginner’s mind” and utilize the flow-state to achieve a direct expression.

All of my work comes out of extensive sketching and drawing. Very rarely do I recreate exact drawings as sculpture but I use them as a spring board to begin experimenting. Most of these drawings are small and done very quickly. By hesitating less, I have focused on completing an artwork in one or two sessions as opposed to laboring over it. The surfaces on the new works have become less concerned with refinement and I feel this has created a warmer and more active surface.

The style of my most recent artworks is influenced by the “street” art that blanketed my New York City neighborhood during lockdown. The images reference psychology, structural systems, emergence theory and the architecture of the human body. Improvisation and freehand drawing are emphasized for phenomenological effect and I try to capture the speed of living in Lower Manhattan. Some of my forms are organic and plant-like but others suggest the machinery of a man-made environment. This duality reflects my visual experiences growing up in the lush Florida landscape and my current life living in New York City.

The forms speak to the effects of time on the human body and the natural world. Each work imagined is a small psychological portrait of something struggling to survive or already gone.

Feb 242023

Micaela Amateau Amato, “Yoran Por Aire (contes brevas)”

Photographs by Amadia Shadow Rabbit

Film still from Kiara Mohammed Amin’s “Black Presence”

Film still from Kiara Mohammed Amin’s “Black Presence”

Soonoqo: We Become Body in Waves of Light and Sound at Dunedin Fine Art Center is a multimedia exhibition of 18 artists from around the world who “share a common desire for healing, communal growth and interdependence with nature” curated by S. Toxosi.

S. Toxosi’s statement about the exhibition (from the gallery wall)-

I do not possess the language to truly describe the be-holdings within Soonoqo. As a term within the Somali language, it would be difficult to translate into contemporary English. It considers a pluralistic worldview that allows ‘becoming and returning’ to bear witness of itself, within oneself while conjoining through space and time. Soonoqo, basks in the universal soul. Its otherness is imbued as the ‘physical cosmos’ and all its avatars and manifestations.

To speak in metaphor or in a sense of ‘poetic meditation’, one would engulf whirling vortexes, volcanoes and maelstroms that end up in other universes from which bring new revelations or images, The senses are engaged as viewed in Bruno Ferreira Abdala’s video art When Mother Breathes. It is here we can see a pluralist’s sensibility where the cohorts of Soonoqo ‘become and return’ with offerings that contend with the mythical genesis through the acknowledgement and practices of ancestral wisdom, queering mores, spirituality and love. Thus creating fission through initiating and remembering. There is a subtlety of conjuration, ritual, humility, vulnerability in K. Tauches’s Q.A.L. video-making that unfolds and reveals the sentience of a Nature that provides true sustainability.

Soonoqo is a web of interconnected lights in continuous synchrony. It enables manifestations from varied domains of areas of perceptibility through human inner weavings of life experiences and becomes a variety of communicative prowess that encompasses video arts, film, photography, the written word and sonic compositions. These forms all ultimately resonate with and point toward healing where one/all is purified, catalyzed and cleansed through cooperation with nature, technology, shadow matter, dark matter and invisible matter. As can be seen in the film Womb not Tomb by Dea, where she investigates and yields to the teaching of the four elements or in Kiara Mohammed Amin’s Black Presence, a short film of talismanic energy and transformation.

Artists included in the exhibition- Brandy Eve Allen, Viveka Krumm, Harry Wilson Kapatika, Cara Judea Alhadeff, Sadie Sheldon, Chelsea Rowe, Micaela Amateau Amato, Saudade Toxosi, Jennifer Pyron, Amadia Shadow Rabbit, K.Tauches, Javier T. Dones, Bruno Ferreira Abdala, Sall Lam Toro, Kiara Mohamed Amin, Nayetesi, Dea

For more information on this exhibition check out @soono.qo and this conversation with S. Toxosi and DFAC Curators Catherine Bergmann and Nathan Beard which is very informative.

Beyond the Walls and Arts Annual 2022- Artist Angela Warren

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Dunedin, Florida Art Shows, Largo, Painting / Painters, Pinellas County

Dec 142022

Orange Tree

One Line That Connects Us

Orange Tree by Angela Warren is one of several of her works currently located at the Fenway Hotel in Dunedin, Florida. Organized by Creative Pinellas, Beyond the Walls 2022 places Pinellas County artists in several different hotels in the county.

Warren is also part of Arts Annual 2022 at the Creative Pinellas Gallery. For this exhibition she created the interactive work shown above, One Line That Connects Us.

From her Instagram about the work-

Last summer I took some time to brainstorm this work. I wanted to do a piece that would engage people in the gallery and encourage others to participate in creating. My idea/the concept is that we are all literally connected with one line, there’s so much that divides people but art is a way to connect us together! 💜

One Line That Connects Us:

This is an interactive art piece.

This year was hard. The recent hurricane Ian, the pandemic, various wars…these things pushed us further and further away from each other. It’s time to come back together!

During the 2022 Arts Annual opening on November 11th, I invite friends to have their portrait drawn by me in a “blind contour” style. If guests are feeling extra brave and want to take a turn, it is highly suggested!

The two rules are, no looking at the canvas, and no lifting your marker. This allows for an intimate interaction between the drawer, and the drawee. Once there are a good “community” of drawings, we can fill in each others portraits.

The picture above is from one of the earlier days of the piece. Check out her Instagram for more updated shots or better yet, see it at the gallery.

Tomorrow, 12/15, Creative Pinellas is having a party to celebrate the exhibition, from 6-9pm. It’s a great way to experience the show and meet the artist participants.

Dunedin Fine Art Center- Current Exhibitions- Janos Enyedi, Dunedin Mosaic House, and “We Built This City”

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Ceramic Art, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Dunedin, Florida Art Shows, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Pinellas County, Sculptors / Sculpture

Dec 032022

Study for Milltown Icon, 2003

Dunedin Fine Art Center is currently showing three exhibitions based on the theme of Architecture. The images above are from Rust to Rust: Janos Enyedi and the Architecture of Industry. The work combines painting, photography, and sculpture. Parts of his work appear to be metal but are actually constructed using illustration board. His creations are an impressive exploration of the fading industrial landscape of America’s Rust and Steel Belts.

Janos Enyedi’s discussion of his work in 2009 (from the gallery’s wall information)-

“While I have a special affection for industrial landscapes, it is not industry itself that captures my imagination. What draws my attention is the simplicity and directness of the industrial architecture and the elements that support it.

Nowhere else is the Modernist tenet “form follows function” as explicit. The realm of industry is filled with large iconic shapes- water towers, smokestacks, complex steel structures, monitor roofs, images that we all know.

Most people, if they bother to look at industry at all, see large, dirty hulks. I see other things. There is an old saying, “The Devil is in the details”.

When it comes to industry, I see “Angels” in the details. I see I-beams and angle iron and the shadows they cast on corrugation: torch-cut edges, the staccato of rivets, the patterns of safety plate and rust- always the rich, amazing and beautiful patina of rust.”

The exhibition also includes works that allow you to see a bit of his creative process, including some of his sketches.

Also on view is We Built This City, a multi-media exhibition of work that “investigates the connection between Architecture and Music- conceptually, loosely, physically-poetically”.