What to do about the three weathered, rusting FPL electrical boxes in South Palm Beach that keep the street lights on along the town’s 5/8-mile strip of A1A?
Why, ask the town’s unofficial artist-in-residence Penny Davidson, who, conveniently, lives next door to Town Hall. After all, she created the life-sized bronze loggerhead turtle crawling atop a rock in front of Town Hall to mark South Palm Beach’s 50th anniversary in 2005.
“They’re an eyesore. They’re horrendous,” retired movie hair stylist Paul Least said of the electrical boxes. He campaigned for two years, calling FPL, rallying condo dwellers and pestering town officials to get behind the project.
Not that he had an idea of how to camouflage the boxes. “Just leave it to Penny, because she’s the artist,” he said.
After getting approval from town officials, Davidson brainstormed with Town Manager Rex Taylor last July. “I had done stained glass and worked in sea glass but not usually for outdoor exposure,” she said.
Stained glass was out of the question because the 3-foot by 4-foot creation had to be mounted on marine plywood to stand in front of the boxes. She settled on a glass mosaic.
“It had to be a glass mosaic,” she decided. “I had never done that. How much different would it be than stained glass? Well, there was a world of difference.”
The mosaic was five-and-half months in gestation from sketch to grout between the glass pieces.
“I wanted to reflect the ambiance of the town,” she said. “My first idea was the ocean. An underwater view seemed like a natural to me.”
Davidson painted what she saw snorkeling. Amid the ocean hues of blue swim a grayish barracuda, a manta ray, a pair of sand dollars, a grouper swimming along the bottom and three yellow-striped sergeant majors near undersea coral.
“I wasn’t going to put a turtle in but I had a big space and he belongs there, too,” she said of the loggerhead with flippers outstretched.
Her condominium, Horizons West, let her use a storage room to cut the glass and then soften and bevel the edges with a grinder. She baked each painted shard in her oven.
Then she included a penny, her signature, on the mosaic, sealed the grout and erected it in front of the FPL box at the Southgate condominium.
Davidson, who won’t reveal her age (“I’m 75 and she’s younger than I am,” said Least, helpfully), took a roundabout journey to her late-in-life art career, just as she and her husband, Sol, took a unique trip leading to settling in South Palm Beach.
Born in New Jersey, she taught in low-performing schools in Des Moines, Iowa, for 30 years, but not art. After her three children left the nest, the Davidsons traveled to find a place to retire.
They bought a houseboat in 1982, put it in the Mississippi River 150 miles from home and puttered around for five months before reaching South Florida. They logged 5,000 miles, motoring up the Ohio River to visit a son in Pittsburgh, then back down the Ohio to the Mississippi and south to the Gulf of Mexico.
They hugged the Gulf coast to Sarasota and crossed the state through Lake Okeechobee, settling in Delray Beach. They were live-aboards for eight years, finally buying their ocean-view condo.
Out of curiosity, Penny dabbled in street painting at local festivals, then tried her hand at Gator glass fiberglass creations. Then she tried creations made from sea glass found along the shoreline.
The bronze loggerhead that has become a town symbol was her first venture in that medium. She sculpted it in clay, had a mold made and the turtle was poured on site.
“You do it and you find out” whether you’re any good, she says with a shrug.
Now that the underwater mosaic is installed, she’ll start on the next. “I’ve been thinking about a view from the ocean of the condos along the beach, with them reflected in the water,” she said.
The last will focus on the Town Hall as the heart of the town, with its music and lecture series and art displays. But, who knows, she may change her mind by then.
“The commitment of the town to art in public places is unbelievable,” Davidson said. And she appreciates that
it’s not art by committee.
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