Vero Beach Art Club president Sue Dinenno knows the stuff of which her fellow club members are made.
Last month when she asked painter Lee G. Smith to create an outdoor mural for the city’s Bethel Creek House, she knew she could count on a positive answer.
“Lee didn’t hesitate a moment. She didn’t say, ‘Couldn’t we do this in October, when the weather is cooler?’ She jumped right in,” Dinenno says.
Located on the north side of the building, the mural is a panoramic view of Jaycee Beach. Pelicans gliding into the scene at its top left and right corners form parentheses around the ocean’s long, low horizon, which is further punctuated by colorful beach umbrellas and a life guard station.
Executed in what Smith describes as “realistic impressionism,” the mural’s colors include naturalistic blue, aqua and light brown tones enlivened by bright touches of red and emerald green.
A gift from the Vero Beach Art Club to the City of Vero Beach, the mural appears to have sprung up almost overnight. Its history goes back only slightly farther, to the early part of May, when the art club received a request from the City of Vero Beach Recreation Department to design and execute a mural.
The recreation department’s director, Rob Slezak, was delighted when the club volunteered its members’ creativity and labor to take on the project.
Citing the art club an “ally” with whom his department has worked on previous cultural projects, Slezak says the mural “brings a special quality to our community.”
“We love it,” he adds.
The feeling is mutual, says Dinenno. “This is the fourth time we’ve done a mural for the city,” she says.
Two murals that deal with Vero’s history and tropical setting were completed by art club volunteers for the Florida room of the community center on 14th Avenue in 2001 and 2012, respectively. The outdoor hibiscus mural that decorates a low wall at the corner of 20th Street and Commerce Avenue was renewed by the club in 2011.
The opportunity to do the Bethel Creek House mural was a bolt out of the blue for Lee G. Smith. Dinenno emailed her about a month ago about several projects for which the club needed volunteers.
One of the projects Dinenno invited Smith to consider was the mural; another was to give a lecture about plein air painting at an upcoming art club meeting.
“I’m not comfortable in front of groups,” says Smith. “I volunteered to do the mural.”
Known for her colorful easel paintings of Vero’s ocean, buildings and people, Smith has experience painting murals from her time in Massachusetts years ago – she did one for a school and one for a hospital. The Bethel Creek project is her biggest painting to date.
Dinenno took Smith’s working sketches to meetings of the recreation department and City Council for approval.
The first sketch showed the view across the street of Jaycee Park’s picnic shelters and sabal palms scattered across the green lawn. The second showed the beach beyond the park.
The focal point of that composition is a lifeguard station overlooking a sunny sea. Because lifeguard training is held in Bethel Creek House, Smith thought the scene was especially appropriate for the mural. That was the sketch city officials ultimately approved in May.
Before she began painting the mural, Smith had the entire north side of the building painted fiery red.
This, she says, was akin to toning a canvas with a unifying base color, a technique that she has used to good effect with her plein air easel paintings.
“It gives such a richness to the subsequent colors that you apply,” she says.
In Smith’s finished paintings, the bright red ground is largely obscured by other colors, but peeps through here and there to enliven the spaces between her energetically applied brush strokes.
The general public, not clued in to Smith’s working technique, saw only a garish red wall. Some called the city to complain.
“Councilman Jay Kramer came by the second day. He did not look happy,” says Smith, who allayed his fears with an explanation of what she had in mind.
By day three, most of the red had vanished under broad area of sea and sky colors. Up close, the red is still visible on the dimpled texture of the cinder block wall, creating a subtle foil for the composition’s predominant blues and greens.
Smith sketched the composition freehand on the wall, then had help filling in the colors from Dinenno and other art club volunteers including May Brandt, Minakshi De, Gail Dolphin, Tillman Maxwell and Lionel Ogilvie.
When Smith rounded up the volunteers, a long, tall physique was a plus; at five-foot-four, she couldn’t reach the top of the painting even with a ladder.
“Lionel is the only one who can reach the really tall parts of the mural,” says Smith of her more than six-foot-tall helper. Minakshi De also came in for praise for her lofty stature, as well as woodworker Maxwell Tillman.
“He’s not a painter, but he agreed to help because of his height,” she says. “I ran into him and said, ‘Tillman, do you need volunteer hours, and would you mind getting up on a ladder?’”
Besides wrestling with a ladder, Smith found the most challenging part of the mural was selecting colors, not from her familiar tubes of artist’s pigments, but from house paint swatches. Don Smith Paint and Decorating donated the paint and wide bristle brushes.
About seven colors of satin acrylic were pre-mixed, with some used straight out of the can. Others were mixed to get the colors she wanted. The paint store also gave her liquid pigments used to tint base paint, so Smith could mix small batches of color from scratch.
“’It’s looking great.’ has been a common comment,” says Smith of the reaction of passers-by. “One of the lifeguard students said ‘Oh, it looks so nice.’ That made me feel very good. There was a lady on a bike yesterday and she was really impressed. It’s nice to get that feedback.”