Members
Kirby Gregory, Sherron Totter, Jenny Odom, John David Busby, Lauren Dunston, Sue Aitkin
Kirby Gregory, Pottery
P.O. Box 83
Apalachicola, FL
[email protected]
229-886-2256
I make functional and non-functional pottery incorporating abstracted and carved surfaces in the design.
Sherron Totter, Artist
850-766-3036
[email protected]
Wewahitchka, FL
I was born to make pottery, starting as a young child playing in the mud. I always knew from a young age what I was going to do. High school ceramics class and then off to college in a Fine Arts Degree. Santa Ana High and then graduating at Long Beach State specializing in, Painting, ceramics, drawing, photography, sewing. Decorating, crafting.
My first job was a ceramic decorator/painter for many years doing production work. Knowing how to throw on the Potters Wheel, I decided to do my own business doing jewelry wholesale. I always had nature and animals inspiring me all the time.
I was introduced to doing Art Show/Street Fairs on the weekends and loved it. I traveled all over the country selling my wares. I have taught beginning ceramics to adults and children. Hand building and throwing. I also love to sculpt. Not limited to one technique or application. I like it all and cannot get enough pottery in this creative brain, eager to learn new things. Learning is an endless journey. Recently residing in north Florida and having the ocean on my back door. Sea life has been a nice transition to what I am making now. I currently sell in galleries now making one of a kind, hand thrown pieces and some sculptures. I love what I do and would never change a thing of what I do for a living. It is truly a 35 year passion.
Jenny Odom, Artist, Painter
850-316-0630
[email protected]
www.iggyart.com
Full of whimsy and color, Jenny creates unique and original paintings using wood, canvas, found objects, paint and paper. Her work is widely collected in the Southwest and Florida. She is well-known for her pet portraits, dogs, birds and funky landscapes.
“I have always embraced this idea, that we are all artists and imagination experts as children, but as we grow up we lose that sense of wonder and creativity. In my art, and in my life, I strive to be playful and create the unexpected. Creating art is a journey, and I get lost in the process as my mind takes a road trip to another place.”
John David Busby, Photographer
Port St. Joe
[email protected]
[email protected]
www.jdbusbyphotography.com
I began shooting with black and white film in the 70s and expanded in to experimenting with high contrast film in my darkroom. My high contrast work was the first photography that I displayed and sold in local art shows in the San Francisco area. I eventually began doing color photography using slide film to capture the seascapes along the Monterey and Carmel coastlines.
I switched to digital photography shortly after the digital era began and have never stopped taking photos of landscapes along coastlines. I try to capture the scenery as a lasting memory of each specific site.
I was accepted by iStockPhoto.com as a contributing stock photographer in 2005. My passion, however, still remains taking nature and landscape photos around the country. My landscape photographs were selected in 2009 to be represented by the Katharine Butler Gallery in Sarasota, Florida. Since my wife and I decided in 2010 to build our retirement home in Gulf County (we moved to the Forgotten Coast this past April), I began to focus on photographing the Forgotten Coast and have been accepted in to the Bowery Gallery in Aplalachicola and the Sea Oats Gallery on St. George Island. I tend to focus on two distinct styles of photography: panoramic landscapes and HDR (High Dynamic Range) landscape photography.
Lauren Dunston, Printmaker
LGDunston Gyotaku Fish Prints
Carrabelle, FL
[email protected]
LGDunston.com
Mission: I am drawn to the raw, unconventional beauty that exists within an animal after it has taken its last breath. Each time I closely examine a creature, I am rewarded with evidence of LIFE, not death. Every living being has a story, a distinct and separate experience that deserves my respect. That is why I print dead fish, because they deserve immortality.
Sue Aitkin, Artist
Carrabelle, FL
[email protected]
For me there is nothing like building a picture. I begin with a blank canvas or paper and proceed to make my marks, using oil paints or pastels or charcoal, or pencil. Or all of the above. So I proceed, an image appearing before me, demanding structure, architecture, refinements, erasures, thought. The colors shaping the forms. The details of the struggle apparent at every pause. When the surface is blatant, solid, impenetrable, then I invite my gods — Vermeer, Cezanne, Matisse, de Kooning, Joan Mitchell to name a but a few — to have a look. Sometimes it works, often not. I go at it again.
I grew up in Tulsa. After earning a BA in English lit, minor in art history, I moved to Manhattan to study drawing and painting with Mercedes Matter. Simultaneously some of her students at Pratt enlisted her help in setting up a “pure” art student environment. She asked me to help in the founding of the New York Studio School. I never learned how to make money from my art. I relied on my academic background and worked freelance in book publishing. Then I found out the super benefits offered to part time workers by Time Inc., so I signed up with Time Magazine and was with them for 20 years. I spent the last three years of my working-for-dollars life as copy chief for People magazine. After early retirement, I returned to my studio full time.