Debbie Brookes stands next to a shell-covered mermaid in her Beachcomber Art gallery in Delray Beach.
INSET BELOW: A shell-covered swordfish.
Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star
By April W. Klimley
Anyone strolling into the Beachcomber Art gallery in Delray Beach is in for a surprise. There’s no standard “shell” art. Instead, the floor, walls and surfaces are filled with exotic, sometimes whimsical, objects embellished with shells, glass and other seashore finds.
The range of variety is breathtaking — with pieces that would enhance any home décor from midcentury modern to traditional.
“I’m just an embellisher,” says Debbie Brookes, standing behind the counter that doubles as part of her workshop. “I can’t let anything sit still. Pianos, guitars, anything sitting still, I cover it.”
This creativity has made her gallery successful virtually from the moment it opened 8½ years ago.
“Almost everyone on the shore has one of my chandeliers,” she says. No wonder she did not need to do much advertising when she moved her shop from Boynton Beach to Delray Beach last year.
Brookes is that unusual combination of good businesswoman, artist, wife and mother. She studied fine art, sculpture and mosaic art while raising two daughters, Desserae and Dana, with her husband of 40 years, Ed Brookes. Simultaneously, she ran a chain of beauty salons and worked in flower arranging.
Fourteen years ago, she and Ed moved to Ocean Ridge. There, she put together some mosaic-decorated flowerpots with an Art Deco flair that her friends fell in love with. It wasn’t too long afterward that she opened a small studio in Boynton Beach to sell these and other decorative items.
Now in her new Delray location, Brookes has plenty of space to display and sell a much wider range of one-of-a-kind objects, from a sculpture-size mermaid mannequin to flying fish and oversized chandeliers. Some of her smallest items like votive candle holders, $10 apiece, are among her best sellers. Brookes uses shells from the Philippines to adorn her objects and a fast-drying glue, not glue gun, to hold the decorations in place.
As for planning each piece, she doesn’t.
“I’m a scavenger,” she says. “I never know what I’m going to make until I see it.”
But on the business side, she certainly thinks ahead. A while ago she covered a funeral urn box with a shell arrangement for a friend.
After that, orders for similar urn boxes started pouring in. So now Brookes plans to launch a website in 2016 called www.beachurn.com.
If that sounds ahead of its time, maybe it is. But Brookes has great instincts. Her other business plans worked out. So it would not be surprising if this one does, too.
Beachcomber Art is at 900 E. Atlantic Ave., Delray Beach. 808-7502 or www.beachcomberart.com.
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