By Ron Hayes
BRINY BREEZES — “When I was young, I wanted to be an artist,” Marion Roddin recalls. “I could have gone to the Fashion Institute of New York, but my mother didn’t want me to become a hippie.”
After her husband’s early retirement and their move to Florida, Roddin joined the Briny Breezes Art League and started taking watercolor classes. That was 15 years ago, and come the weekend of March 21, you’ll see proof that youthful dreams can blossom with age at the league’s annual art show.
Roddin’s watercolor Nantucket is a delicate rendering of that New England island’s weathered clapboard cottages, summery warm and thoroughly professional.
“I also do stained glass and teach knitting and crotcheting,” Roddin adds. “I’m painting now like I never painted before. And you know what’s funny? My mother wanted every painting I made.”
Compared to the league itself, Roddin’s 15 years of painting make her a youngster. This month’s exhibit will be the 57th annual show and sale, and the league’s 59th anniversary.
Founded in 1950 with a class of about 20, the league held its first classes in a cottage, now long gone, where the town’s beauty parlor stands. In 1953, the league moved to a newer building at the site of the current swimming pool, which arrived in 1967, forcing another move to the current location in a Quonset hut just behind the beauty parlor.
In fact, the art league has been around so long it can boast a second-generation teacher. In the early days, Mildred Miller, a retired fashion designer and illustrator, taught oil and acrylic painting. Miller died in 1997, and for the past six years her daughter, Janice Vizino, has taught watercolors.
Among those early members was Bill Strucker, who had just opened the Gulf Stream Pharmacy in 1956 when he and fellow painters Guy Helps and Peter Colean started painting together.
“There was nothing there except Briny Breezes,” remembers Strucker, 78, who still works part-time at the family business. “It was a pretty isolated area, so painting sort of became a hobby. We’d go on location and paint the old Boca bridge and a few scenes around the area. They have some good artists now. It’s come a long ways.”
Stucker’s worked in oils. Today, most of the league’s 74 members favor watercolor or acrylics, but one member, Terry Welty, is devoted to the world’s oldest known form of painting.
A painter for 20 years, Welty works in encaustic — literally, “to burn in” — fashioning her large, colorful paintings from blocks of pigmented beeswax that are melted and applied to the canvas, hardening so fast that the distinct colors don’t merge. The ancient Greeks heated the wax on an open fire. Welty has a more modern approach.
“My palette is a pancake griddle,” she jokes, “and a very messy one.”
Like Roddin, she found her vocation later in life.
“When my youngest went away to college,” she says, “I started taking classes. It was one of those empty-nest things.”
In the coming show, she’s displaying an encaustic of roseate spoonbills taking flight and leaving nests of their own.
Sure to sell out every year are Barbara Mulvey’s cartoon-style impressions of Briny Breezes itself. A retired art teacher, Mulvey creates cheerful montages that capture the beach umbrellas and the palm trees, the sunsets and trailer homes that make up the community.
“I can get $30 for one, if it has a frame on it,” she says.
Indeed, the league likes to think of its annual exhibit as “The Affordable Art Show In Palm Beach County.”
Legend has it that, back in the early days, a proud husband altered the price tag on his wife’s work from $20 to $200 — and it sold.
Last year, 37 artists displayed 127 paintings ranging in price from about $50 to $300. But no one seems to be entertaining dreams of getting rich off their art.
“Why don’t I play golf?” says Jim McCormick, a retired newspaperman. “Well, I was never good with any kind of ball.”
Not long after moving to Briny, he struck up a conversation on the beach with an art teacher named Maureen Burns.
“Oh, I used to like to paint,” he told her. Of course, that had been 50 years before, in school. Ten year later, McCormick is still not playing golf.
But don’t look to buy his paintings.
“Oh, no, no,” he says. “I’ve never sold anything.
“I give it all away to family and friends.”
IF YOU GO:
What: 57th Annual Briny Breezes Art Show
When: Saturday & Sunday, March 21-22
Hours: 10 a.m–4 p.m.
Where: On State Road A1A, just south of Woolbright Road
Admission: Free
For more information: Call (561) 276-7405 or (561) 274-3597
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