Wilde Side: Equatorial Effect

On a cold Tuesday night in January, I attended a concert sponsored by the Indian River Symphonic Association, an organization dedicated to bringing world-class symphonies to the Treasure Coast. One of several yearly concerts presented in the Community Church of Vero Beach, an edifice known for its fan-shaped auditorium and wonderful acoustics, that evening’s event featured the Minería Symphony Orchestra of Mexico, conducted by artistic director Carlos Miguel Prieto. Five selections were offered, beginning with Joseph Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto, which featured award-winning trumpet soloist Pacho Flores.

The performance of the following four selections was electrifying, melodic, even raucous, with members of the orchestra attuned to one another, to their conductor, and to their music. Their sound reflected a strong Latin American influence, a tropical imprint managed by their inclusion of certain drums; the claves, a pair of short wooden sticks struck together to create a hard, rhythmic sound; a guitar; and a notched flute called an ocarina. The result was classical music made vibrant and heady, the evening’s selections flavored with the tropics.

All arts are influenced by geography, which dictates available materials and inspires themes. More tropical regions appear to make art less cerebral, dissolving the border between rational thought and unstructured, free-floating feeling. Latin American literature, for example, is characterized by Magic Realism, a literary construction wherein the marvelous and the mundane exist without explanation, indigenous mythology and political reality merge, the line between them blurred by novelists such as Gabriel García Márquez.

There is a relatively new movement in architecture called Tropical Modernism, which reflects a more forgiving relationship between structure and climate, revealed in design that is more open, that emphasizes a seamless indoor-outdoor configuration as well as natural ventilation; large, shaded openings; and the use of wood and stone.

Dance has also been influenced by the tropics. American choreographer and dance anthropologist Katherine Dunham, a contemporary of Martha Graham and George Balanchine, introduced the dances of Africa, South America, and the Caribbean into classical ballet, in particular the rhythmic movements of an articulated torso.

Many painters have abandoned cooler climates for the tropics, or at least someplace warmer—such as Matisse, who left northern France to paint in Nice. Paul Gauguin outdistanced Matisse, traveling all the way to the South Seas, where he “plunged happily and eagerly into the wilderness [Tahiti]” to paint.

Paintings inspired by the tropics, like those of Gauguin, Rousseau, and even the Florida Highwaymen—a group of Black artists who originated in the area of Fort Pierce in the 1950s—are more flamboyant, executed with vibrant colors and bold forms. Not just the art itself but the very act of painting is different in the tropics. Colors run more freely and dry more quickly, so that painting becomes a dance between execution and evaporation.

Florida has had its share of painters, although initially the goal was the subject and not the climate. In 1564, French watercolorist Jacques Le Moyne accompanied a French Huguenot expedition to Florida to paint indigenous tribes. Two centuries later, John James Audubon came to paint birds, about the same time George Catlin, known for his portrait of Seminole leader Osceola, visited the peninsula to document the landscape and the Seminoles.

American artist Winslow Homer visited Florida many times, including the last six years of his life, to paint some of his most powerful watercolors. A contemporary of Renoir and Degas, Homer produced work that was different, not that of manicured gardens of Europe but reflecting instead the traditions and virgin landscape of the isolated continent that was North America, where undisturbed forests were greener than the copses of Europe.

The problem for Homer was one of perception. Raised in Boston, he was a New England Yankee born and bred, surrounded by a cultural climate in which critics and just plain folks had read about the old masters and wished to acquire them, a critical community that held that America had no indigenous artistic resources, that the United States was aesthetically barren.

This past December, I flew up to Boston, where I visited the city’s Museum of Fine Arts to see the largest collection of Homer’s watercolors, “Of Light and Air: Winslow Homer in Watercolor.” The title of the exhibition was based on a quote from American novelist Henry James, who described Homer as “an artist who sees everything at one with its envelope of light and air.” Including oils and drawings from his work as an illustrator for Harper’s Weekly, the exhibit was held in the Rotunda, a lower-level gallery accessed by a flight of stairs banked by a system of sound effects including that of a wave crashing on the beach.

Featured were nearly 50 works, highlighting masterpieces such as Leaping Trout, The Blue Boat, The Fog Warning, and one painting called Right and Left, the shooting of two birds with a double-barreled shotgun, painted a year before his death while recovering from a stroke. The display illustrated Homer’s career, beginning in woodblock drawings for Harper’s Weekly depicting Americans at play and pretty girls in woodland settings, then changing to oils during the Civil War, an event that was to become his anvil. The most famous of his Civil War paintings is Prisoners from the Front.

Homer’s interest in watercolor, a very old medium that was used in medieval manuscript illustrations and then somehow fell into disfavor, began around 1873 with pictures of the water. It was the medium of choice of his artist mother, Henrietta Homer, and he knew he was destined to follow in her footsteps in that regard. He once said, “You will see in the future I will live by my watercolors.”

Changing to watercolor was for Homer a major technical innovation. In his last years in particular, the bright tropical sun helped him find a new and spontaneous luminosity reflected in slashing brushwork, strong colors, and bold concepts. His biographers suggest that Homer was never more relaxed than when painting in watercolor; the most brilliant of his later paintings were executed in the tropics, where his youth and verve seemed to be revived.

Homer’s forays to the tropics began when he visited the Bahamas to paint sponge fishermen for The Century magazine. He was to make many excursions to Florida, visiting Jacksonville, Key West, Tampa, and Enterprise, a little town on the St. Johns River.

In the last years of his life, from 1904 to 1909, Homer made regular winter visits to Florida’s west coast, boarding a steamer in Key West and traveling north to a little fishing town in Citrus County called Homosassa, whose springs are home to vast numbers of migrating manatees.

Homer spent six winters in Homosassa to fish and to paint its swampy bayous, staying at the Homosassa Inn for $12 a week and hiring a cart and buggy and renting a boat and guide. Also known as Dunn’s Inn, the lodging was only a stone’s throw from a small island in the middle of the river, known today as Monkey Island, which in the 1960s became a refuge for spider monkeys formerly used in polio research.

There Homer was to paint some of his most luminous and vibrant watercolors, fresh and light, an increasing subject being man and untamed water. A critic of this later period said of him, “If Homer were a younger man, a wonderful future might be predicted for him.” My favorite picture painted during that period, begun in Florida and finished in Prouts Neck, Maine, is The Gulf Stream, a scene of a lone fisherman adrift on a disabled boat surrounded by sharks and the power of the Atlantic current.

That one of the most brilliant of Homer’s paintings was begun in Florida may be no surprise to those who have come from elsewhere to reinvent themselves in the warmth of the Florida sun.

The town of Homosassa continues to honor Homer; indeed, the walls of its public library are lined with prints that constitute a permanent collection of his works.