Prepare to stay a while when visiting Eau Gallie’s Fifth Avenue Art Gallery. There’s a lot to see.
The member-owned and -operated gallery boasts a roster of 18 artists who work in painting, printmaking, sculpture, jewelry and mixed media. That last category includes a nautilus rendered in glowing neon tubing. Mounted atop a pure white stretched canvas, “Our Chambered Lives” by Heather Kelley is the first thing you see when you set foot in the gallery, and the last thing you will turn to look at when you leave.
On a recent afternoon two of the gallery’s artists, Barbara Desrosiers and Lois Mittleman, were on duty to greet visitors and ring up sales; each member commits a couple days a month to staffing the gallery.
Desrosiers is a painter and photographer who sometimes mixes those mediums in her work. Mittleman creates jewelry variously of metal, glass and semiprecious stone. The two are also, respectively, Fifth Avenue’s publicity head and exhibit chair. For a first-time visitor, their presence is a bonus; both are eager to relate the gallery’s history and offer the lowdown on the artists who show there.
Founded in 1975, Fifth Avenue Gallery was originally located on Fifth Avenue in Indialantic, Florida. The name stuck; the location didn’t. According to Mittleman, the gallery’s early life was marked by moves from one rental retail space to another; none of them seemed just right.
In 1981 the gallery’s members purchased land on the Eau Gallie district’s Highland Avenue (across from the present-day Foosaner Art Museum) and decided to build a gallery there.
Ellen Pavlakos, a sculptor who had just joined the gallery, brought in her husband Andrew, a designer and builder of custom homes and commercial buildings. He took on the challenge of designing a structure specifically to house an art gallery. Completed in 1985, the building has served its purpose well ever since.
The street-facing front part of the gallery, separated from the main body of the interior by freestanding walls, is reserved for temporary solo and group exhibitions. Artists who exhibit there are not necessary members. Its current exhibition, “Child’s Play: A Journey into Imagination,” features oil paintings by Lisa Mistiuk, who resides with her husband, an automotive designer, and their children in greater Detroit.
The artist and her family lived for a time on the Space Coast. Back in 2011 Mistiuk, a California native and a recent graduate of San Francisco’s Academy of Art University, showed her work in two of Fifth Avenue’s group shows. During her brief time with the gallery Mistiuk, by dint of her artistic talent and congeniality, made a lasting impression on her colleagues. They still follow her progress, both as an artist and as a doting mother.
“She uses her children as models for her paintings,” says Mittleman.
Roughly half of the 20 works on display from Mistiuk are paintings of children quietly playing or daydreaming. The most ambitious of these is “High Seas and an Office Chair,” a canvas that shows a little boy in a paper cap solemnly rotating the legs of an overturned swivel chair-turned-ship’s wheel. Both he and his craft are threatened – in imagination only – by a realistically painted wall of water that crests over the boy’s head and splashes onto the carpet – er, deck – in front of him.
Three small still-life paintings in the show portray part of a toddler’s wooden train set, a folded paper airplane and a few sticks of crayon, respectively. Placed against ambiguous backgrounds with not a child in sight, these unassuming gems speak volumes about the simple pleasures of childhood.
Beyond the exhibition of Mistiuk’s pictures, the lion’s share of the gallery is taken up by works from Fifth Avenue’s member artists, along with a few shelving units stocked with pottery by outside vendors.
Each member artist’s display includes a selection of works; those exhibits change and their placement within the gallery rotates at intervals.
The exception to this is the work of Pavlakos, whose sculptures occupy pedestals and a large riser at the center of the gallery.
Although she has been a Fifth Avenue member since 1979, there is ultimately a practical reason for her work to take center stage.
Not counting her 76-inch-long cast resin mermaid suspended from the gallery’s ceiling, Pavlakos’ figural works are made of bronze. They are just plain heavy and inconvenient to move.
“She’s a little bitty person. It’s always hard for me to think of her standing in a metal foundry,” says Mittleman.
And while her figures are smaller than life-size, Pavlakos’ skill in modeling the human form and the dignity with which she imbues her subjects give them a monumental feel.
Most of the members of the gallery have little formal art education outside of self-directed study in museum-sponsored classes and workshops. It is instead the desire to create, along with a wealth of experience in non-art careers, which has guided each artist’s style and vision.
For example, although Barbara Desrosiers holds a BFA in studio art from the University of Rhode Island, it was marriage to a military chaplain and the couple’s subsequent 25 years of world travel that inspire much of her work. She paints using the ancient technique of encaustic, applying hot, pigmented wax onto panels. The wax makes for thickly textured paintings that appear to glow from within. Three paintings from her rose window series on display typify her interest in abstract geometry with spiritual undertones.
Desrosiers is also a digital photographer who spent about two years “out in the wetlands” shooting her favored subject, Florida’s birds. She sometimes overlays her photographic imagery with her translucent encaustic medium; an example is “Hawk Eyed Guardian,” a portrait in profile of a red shouldered hawk.
Desrosiers didn’t have to stand in a swamp to photograph this subject.
“This guy was very gracious. He actually lives in our neighborhood,” she says.
Mittleman, who has a bachelor’s degree in music education from Indiana University, started weaving in 1980 after an artist friend taught her to make baskets. In 1999 her attention turned to jewelry. Mittleman’s materials include brass, copper and sterling silver, sometimes in combination with ready-made beads of ceramic, glass and stone.
She says her training as a musician and her work as a visual artist have a few things in common: timbre (or emotional resonance), tone, color, balance, form and dynamics.
To those artful qualities she adds one more: the ability to take risks.
The Fifth Avenue Art Gallery is at 1470 Highland Ave., Melbourne.