For gallerist Steve Koman, it’s hard to count the ways in which artist Jerry Rose’s painterly charms delight him as well as his visitors to Koman Fine Art, the beachside gallery on Vero’s Cardinal Drive that is currently featuring Rose’s paintings.
“One reason we like him – well, we like him for a lot of reasons,” says Koman about the artist, who for many years lived in Palm City and Stuart and exhibited his works in a number of shows and galleries.
“We like the variety of his work, which ranges from almost abstract to very realistic.”
Rose’s subject matter is as narrow and as broad as the wilds and waters near his costal home in Sedgwick, Maine, where he moved in 2010, as well as the Bahamas, which he visits on his sailboat every winter to paint.
“I don’t stick to any one style, I respond with the style that fits the idea,” said Rose, reached aboard his boat as he readied it for his annual painting trip.
His more impressionist, bravura style seems earmarked for the fleeting effects of Maine’s precious light, while his finer and more detailed brushwork is reserved for the harshly-lit details of an all-but-vanished Bahamian lifestyle.
There are plenty of examples of both themes at Koman’s gallery, where two seascapes surge against the rocky Maine coast in the gallery’s front windows, while the main part of the gallery vaunts sunny skies and cerulean waters.
Rose and his work came to the gallery on the recommendation of a customer who owns a number of Rose’s watercolors. That collector assured Koman that Rose would be a good fit for the gallery.
Koman responded by inviting Rose to an initial showing in 2015.
“We only got a few works that year and we sold them,” Koman says.
This year, Koman began with 25 of Rose’s paintings. Since going on display less than a month ago, they have again proven to be a hit with the Vero Beach audience: At least nine of the Bahamian paintings have sold, at last check.
It is easy to see why. Take his just-finished “On Board a Conch Smack,” which shows a lone fisherman squatting on the edge of his wooden boat; a pile of Queen conchs glisten on the deck before him. His heavy craft seems to levitate rather than float atop the turquoise surface beneath it.
“I’ve never been to the Bahamas, but people say Rose understands the water he paints,” says Koman.
Rose asserts that he has had plenty of practice. An experienced sailor (and one-time boat builder), he first sailed to the islands in 1977 when, on a trip from New England to the Caribbean, he began to have problems with his boat somewhere off Cape Hatteras.
“I put in at the first port I could find in the Bahamas for repairs, and I’ve been going back every year since,” he says.
Warming to his subject, Rose explains that the Bahamas occupies more area than the Caribbean: “The islands begin at the same latitude as Stuart, and extend all the way down to the southern tip of Cuba!”
His favorite spot to drop anchor is the Central Exumas, the midpoint of which falls on and around Staniel Cay, one of 365 tiny islands that comprise the Bahamas’ Exuma district.
“They’ve got some remote settlements there,” says Rose.
Rose tells the story of the islands’ black inhabitants, descended from enslaved West Africans. Some of them came with white settlers in the mid-17th century; others came to the British-held islands with their white Loyalist owners after the American Revolution. Still other Africans, freed from slave ships, settled in the Bahamas after England abolished its slave trade in 1809. After 1820, American slaves and Seminole Indians, aided by the Bahamians, escaped to the islands.
There they found freedom and subsistence as fishermen, especially of conch, which was bountiful in those days. Traditionally found in cays’ shallow waters, conches were easily gathered from small wooden boats. Due to overfishing, these hunting grounds started to decline a century ago.
In 1977, when Rose began to make his annual visits, traditional conch fishing was moribund. Rose got to know some of the Exumas’ remaining conch-fishing families and, returning year after year, watched their children grow up.
Living on his 37-foot, custom-built aluminum sailboat-studio for months on end, Rose and his vessel became such a familiar sight in these communities that fishermen soon paid little mind to the doings of the inquisitive artist.
“I spent weeks keeping my sailboat in sight of their smacks, and went out in my dingy to follow them into narrow water,” Rose says.
One of the sights he saw again and again is exemplified by the painting “Conching, Exumas” from last year’s trip.
In it, two men in a tiny wooden dinghy ply their trade in sparking green shallows. The man in the bow bends over to peer into a glass-bottomed cask he steadies in the water with one hand; this will allow him to see the mollusk on the sand below. The fisherman’s other hand grasps the end of a long pole; hooks at its end will snag his prey.
Beside him a slender man in a white T-shirt and with trousers a few sizes too big for him stands in the stern stabilizing the craft with a single oar. Silhouetted against the sky, his head is turned toward us. The man’s features, thrown into shadow by a faded bill cap, seem to acknowledge our presence, while his erect posture bespeaks the confidence of one who knows this boat and these waters well.
Hanging to the left of this picture, a portrait titled “Jacob Clark” (2016) gives us a better look at this dignified man. He is again shown holding the end of his oar, which disappears from the composition at its lower right corner. To the lower left, a pile of pink-lipped conchs lay in mute entreaty.
Clark’s level features, shown again in shadow, are the definition of inscrutability.
Rose describes his demeanor as “regal.”
During an early visit to the Bahamas, a portrait Rose did of Clark turned out so well that he invited Clark and his fishing companions to come aboard his sailboat to view it.
When Clark demurred, Rose asked, “Don’t you want to see your picture?”
It was one of the other fishermen who clued Rose in. “Jake is blind,” the man said.
Clark died in 1996, but thanks to Rose’s 30 years of on-site painting in the Bahamas, as well as the artist’s decades-old resource photos, Jacob Clark, as well as the type of old-style fishing boat he oared, and the simple ways of his fellow fisher folk, live on in Rose’s paintings.
“All the boats then were wooden vessels,” Rose sighs.
In fact, he says, the only type of boat he paints nowadays are wooden Bahamian conch boats.
“I am still tied a little bit to traditional ideas in my paintings,” he admits.
