SEBASTIAN — While the heat of midday baked the nearby highway, around the corner on Indian River Drive sweet puffs of air seemed to come out of nowhere, wafting from the lagoon to cool artist Geoffrey Myers as he sculpted in the backyard of his Sebastian home.
Whatever magic made it 10 degrees cooler around Myers, it was clearly cooler – and more magical – 40 years ago on a farm in Massachusetts, when he was involved in designing and building a recording studio that ended up drawing the royalty of rock.
From Aerosmith to Mick Jagger to Myers’ current neighbor, Arlo Guthrie, Long View Farm became a haven for musicians.
Googling the list of megastars who recorded there is for Myers the equivalent of flipping through a college yearbook.
Today, though he is mainly a sculptor, Myers lends his musical talents to different nobility: a group of senior bluegrass musicians who descend on Sebastian in season, playing traditional tunes and instruments in the local community center.
As for Long View Farm, it is still in operation, hosting bands like Death Cab for Cuties and the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s.
It still boasts some of his sculptures, earning a place on his long resume under “corporate collections.”
In his career, Myers has exhibited in galleries from Boston to Fort Lauderdale. His works are in the homes of several Vero Beach collectors, sold through two high-end local galleries, since closed – Martha Lincoln Gallery and the Pate Collection.
Myers also showed at Gasiunasen Gallery in Palm Beach. He is currently represented by Las Olas Fine Art in Fort Lauderdale.
Shunning air conditioning, Myers opts to sculpt on a covered outdoor terrace. With a spackle knife, he dips into a plastic bucket for a swath of dark mud, a sculpting mixture he calls Acrylstone.
Pressing the fine paste onto a wire mesh form, he begins the early phase of a new creation, a wending tubular composition that when dry can be polished or left rough, not unlike marble, he says.
Though strong, the resulting sculpture will be remarkably lightweight.
Around him, sculptures of all sizes surround him like students, round and squat, lean and tall, figurative and abstract.
As a favorite acoustic guitar melody drifted from overhead speakers, Myers recalls that he arrived in Sebastian to build a studio for his friend Arlo Guthrie, another alumnus of Long View.
It was the late 1990s and Guthrie had stumbled on Sebastian when he came with a friend to visit Kashi Ashram a few miles west on Roseland Road.
Guthrie bought an old crab processing plant, hoping to turn it into a home; he eventually had to raze it and build his home from scratch.
Myers bought the house across the street.
Myers graduated from the University of Connecticut with a degree in fine art. He got a job with a top architectural firm in New York that was just wrapping up work on Lincoln Center.
He built models of the sculptures to be set around the complex, and paid particular attention when engineers discussed acoustics in the various venues.
“I developed a feeling for acoustics and designing rooms that people respected and loved,” Myers says. “But I had no technical training. These guys would come in with their instruments and measure the reverberation times. But it’s a quasi-science, a soft science. It means nothing unless you have an intuitive feeling for it.”
Myers “sees” not only with his sculpting hands, but with his musical ear.
“Music and art, it’s all vibration. We live in a vibrational world,” he says. “A blind person can tell the size of a room by the acoustics.”
Stevie Wonder has “seen” Myers’ work; he was one of the earliest musicians to record at Long View Farm.
After working in architecture, Myers opened a gallery in Provincetown, Mass. It was there he was recruited to join an almost metaphysical effort to build a “reality simulator,” to use the phrase of Gil Markle, a graduate of Yale and a Fulbright scholar teaching at Clark University.
Markle had just purchased a 100-acre farm in western Massachusetts.
Learning of Myers’ design ability and construction know-how, he hired him to make his dream of a recording retreat a reality.
Since it opened in 1975, more than 200 Grammy award-winning recordings have been made at Long View, an hour and a half outside of Boston.
Today, Myers jams with his friends on a raised stage in his Sebastian living room, with guitars, conga drums and mic stands.
In a back room – the only one with air conditioning – is a 1925 baby grand piano Myers taught himself to play, as he did with all his instruments.
He has also taught himself to sing, thanks to a Sebastian group of bluegrass musicians that descend on the village every season.
With some well into their 90s, they have proved inspirational to the deeply respectful Myers.
“They go around the room and when it’s your turn, you have to sing. So I learned to sing,” he says, offering a sample of his folksy voice in a composition of his own.
Myers plays mostly mandolin, though he also owns four vintage Martin guitars and a few Fender basses as well.
These days, Myers’ studio behind his home has come alive with visiting young people, the children of old friends and relatives.
He is used to having children trying their hand at sculpture: he offered classes through the Cultural Council.
Scattered under bushes are forgotten projects left behind by former students.
While Myers taught for several years at the Vero Beach Museum of Art, he says he prefers teaching here in his backyard.
“It’s messy, and you’re spread out. At the museum people get offended when you leave things out. Here, I can keep things going.”
“When kids get in the environment of folding chairs, they want to be bad,” he says laughing. “At the museum, I’d have half the class out in the hallway for talking on their cell phones. Here, it’s a homey atmosphere. I’d make snacks, and we’d run over to the ocean or jump in my dinghy or make kites.”
“This house was a wretched wreck when I bought it,” he says of his 1950s-era house. “There were things in the carpet I can’t even identify. There was a fortune in scrap metal just in the junked tractors and lawn mowers and boat trailers.”
Today, he enjoys a gourmet kitchen in full view of the living room stage, and he can take a break in the shade of his riverfront flagstone porch, rebuilt after the hurricanes ripped off the roof – and smashed a few sculptures in the yard.
Leaning past a giant oak, he admires his new sailboat, a 32-footer with a retractable keel built by Nick Hake of Stuart, “a genius,” Myers says.
Recently, he affixed a mooring to the river bottom, just beyond Guthrie’s two-story home.
He dreams of sailing it to Cape Cod with his nephew, stopping to paint along the way.
“I want to take my little portable easel and pull that boat into a little cove, and bring my mandolin and my guitar,” Myers says. “That would be my escape.”
