By Doc Lawrence
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Original Florida is
easy to find. It’s in that vast green prairie with occasional rolling hills
interspersed with wetlands, lakes and streams comfortably away from crowded
beaches and theme parks. It’s a gentle land where wildlife thrives, coexisting
alongside people in picturesque towns with almost endless outdoor recreational
opportunities. Here is a unique, deeply embedded culture closely tied to nature
featuring big skies, subterranean aquifers, wildlife, literature, music and
art.
For those looking
for cultural wonders, Florida offers a trove. Art, in particular folk art,
symbolically tells so much about the Sunshine State and the Deep
South. Jeanine Taylor, a Miami native, was educated at FSU and transitioned
from a career in education to owning and managing a successful gallery in
Sanford, a lovely town not far from Orlando, but light years away when measured
by quiet elegance and charm. Jeanine Taylor Folk Art Gallery occupies a
beautiful 100 year-old building and is celebrating a milestone of 20 years.
Works by artists who visually tell the world what Florida and the South
represent are omnipresent, covering walls, filling display tables, rising from
floors and hanging from above. Collectively, they become an indoor rainbow of
colors with powerfully positive energy.
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| "Louie" Guards Thomason's Paintings |
Paintings by
Atlanta folk artist Olivia Thomason just joined the works of others in Ms.
Taylor’s gallery. Some like Missionary Mary Proctor, Ab the Flagman and Eric
Legee are also Ms. Thomason’s friends from her days as a gallery owner. An
accomplished artist, Thomason has a display case filled with awards including
Atlanta’s artist of the year and gallery of the year. Coming to Jeanine
Taylor’s gallery in Sanford, she says, “is an exciting opportunity. I want to
be around Florida’s authenticity and have a lifelong love of so much of its
core culture including legendary authors like Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Zora
Neale Hurston.” She added that “knowing and admiring Jeanine Taylor drew me
here like a magnet.”
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| Jeanine Taylor |
Jeanine Taylor says her love of the arts of the region
enamored her “with southern art and culture,” leading to the successful
establishment of her gallery specializing in contemporary folk art from the
Deep South. Ms. Taylor garners praise from high places. GO Inflight, Air Tran’s passenger publication, selected her
gallery as one of the “twenty essential galleries in the
country” alongside prestigious urban galleries in New York, Miami, Los Angeles,
Santa Fe and Chicago.
Ms. Thomason, in addition to her awards, has painted poet
Carl Sandburg’s home, “Connemara,” a national historic shrine in Flat Rock, NC.
Other notable paintings include the billboard greeting Atlanta’s Stone Mountain
Park’s 8 million annual visitors. “I’ll always be at heart a country girl and
my favorite paintings are based on precious memories from childhood.”
Her memory paintings adorn a lively wall in Jeanine Taylor
Folk Art Gallery.
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