While the electric feel of Disney World and the neon lights of South Beach draw millions of people to Florida every year, the willowing pines and wilderness attract others.
Keith Padgett, an artist out of Wakulla Springs, has always felt a calling to the river bends and to those pines that whisper as they sway in the wind… if you listen closely enough.
Padgett said he finds his cathedral under those pine, cypress and oak canopies.
“I’ll actually sit my easel up in my canoe and go down and sit my paints up and paint my paintings,” Padgett said. “That is where I find I am the closest to being who I really am and who and where I was made from.”
Padgett paints the winding rivers, waterside forests and old-timey shrimp boats of Florida’s rural Gulf Coast.
Yet, like many other artists who paint landscapes of nature in Florida, Padgett fears the myriad of threats chipping away at the very subject of his work.
Florida had one of the fastest-growing state populations in 2023. While that means a boon for the economy, many worry about the consequences of rapid growth on the environment.
Some artists, like Padgett, are concerned about losing the land around them to development. Others worry about the degradation of watery muses, such as the natural springs that flow throughout central and northern Florida and are turning their work into activism.
The springs
Gainesville painter Margaret Ross Tolbert started noticing a change in her subject, Florida’s freshwater springs, around the 1990s.
“I remember I would go to certain springs, and I would paint this new green color, and I had never used that color before, and then it turned out it was algae,” Tolbert said. “I’d never really seen it like that, and then I started seeing less and less visibility and clarity in the water.”
Tolbert’s large canvas paintings are captivating with blue and green brush strokes. She paints most of her pieces outside in her backyard, displayed under bamboo that seems to reach the clouds. Many of the paintings depict fish that she sees when diving in the springs.
Tolbert said she has always felt a connection to the springs and has drawn a global audience, including customers in Turkiye. Witnessing the change in the springs has only inspired Tolbert to paint them more. But instead of focusing on the springs in Florida that are diminished, she hopes to inspire change with the beauty of those that remain.
She said she doesn’t focus on the dying springs because “I’m not sure that makes people change. They say, ‘Well then, what can I do? So, whatever I give up,’” Tolbert said. “I think also some people don’t like to see the negative parts, so it’s like focusing on the positive, I think, reaches people.”
Another artist in Gainesville, Tim Malles, also said witnessing this change in the springs has driven him to paint them more.
“We’re trying to capture something that’s very quickly being lost; I think that’s the main thing that inspires a lot of artists now,” Malles said. “What we’re trying to do is trying to relate that beauty to people.”
Malles said many Floridians live in the state their whole lives and never experience the beauty of the springs for themselves, so they may not care about protecting the one-of-a-kind ecosystems.
“We’re seeing something that’s been here for tens of thousands of years, just being so radically changed in one generation,” Malles said. “It’s astounding, and we’re not getting the kind of support that the public needs to protect these natural places; that’s really the issue.”
Tolbert said she still finds beauty in every spring she visits. She said she is a complete person when she is at the springs.
“I can’t really paint the sad-looking stuff; I mean, it might show up like the green paint does,” Tolbert said. “But what I can do is I sort of watch myself do gymnastics to get around the poor lost springs and then paint the beautiful one.”
Silver Springs, one of the largest artesian springs in the world, has lost a third of its flow over the last century, according to the St. Johns River Water Management District, and is plagued with nitrogen pollution from septic tanks and fertilizers.
Many other Florida springs have lost their flow, and some have dried up entirely.
“It’s happening more and more and more at an alarming rate, and it’s depleting the aquifer, so what happens is the springs stop flowing,” Malles said. “So when you go there, you don’t see this beautiful environment; it’s just this ugly little hole in the earth.”
Tolbert said one way to help control water use stems back to land trusts.
Private property owners apply for “consumptive-use permits” allowing them to draw groundwater from beneath their property. Land trusts help conserve the water below rather than pumping it, often to the tune of millions of gallons.
Land trusts can target conservation goals, like protecting springs recharge areas where land captures water before it seeps into the ground and flows back to the springs.
Tolbert said she has used her paintings to spread awareness about the springs and give back to them.
“I can’t take time to successfully make the arguments or win the battles, but I can do a little bit, and sometimes it’s donating a large part of my sales,” Tolbert said. “And then sometimes it really is that someone develops some interest in something they like about my painting, and then I can share it with them, and I can take them there.”
Tolbert said that much of the money she donates goes toward land trusts, which she considers one of the most effective ways of protecting the springs.
“I think our instincts as humans are about commodification, and we just think water is a commodity,” Tolbert said. “But water is not a commodity. It’s something that requires space and movement, and if we start leaving it in natural places, you will see immediate improvement.”
Malles and Tolbert hope that the springs' beauty will save them in the end.
“You know I’m ready to get off this planet sometime soon, but I’ve got skin in the game, I’ve got children, I’ve got grandchildren. We take them to the springs all the time,” Malles said.
“Whenever we go, we try to find the most natural places, the natural springs that aren’t overdeveloped.”
Development dilemmas
While artists like Tolbert believe a solution can be found in land trusts and conservation, other artists think the answer can be found in smarter and more sustainable development.
Linda Ballantine Brown has been in ranching for over 40 years, starting in Kissimmee. She draws inspiration from her experiences owning horses and cows.
Her paintings depict the beauty in the everyday life of a Florida cowboy and the cracker horses and cattle that have been in Florida since Juan Ponce De León brought them to the state in 1521.
Ballantine Brown moved to Florida with her family when Disney World started booming. However, it was that same boom that forced Ballantine Brown to relocate.
“I guess I came with the mess, and it changed Florida completely forever,” Ballantine Brown said. “A lot of good and a lot of bad, you know, of course, everybody likes everything to stay the same, but that does not happen.”
Ballantine Brown relocated to a small ranch in Williston because of the rapid development in Orlando and Kissimmee. Her move is reflected in her work, shifting her focus from painting cattle to now the Florida Cracker horse, hoping to draw attention to the complexities of animals and ranch life in Florida.
“It just fascinated me how rich the history is in Florida, and a lot of people don’t know about it,” Ballantine Brown said. “When they move to Florida, they think of the beach and Disney, but really, our rich history is with the Cracker cowboys, and I just think it doesn’t need to get lost.”
Ballantine Brown said her paintings depict a side of ranch animals that an everyday person would overlook. She said her paintings show the raw emotion these ranch animals feel.
She uses rich and vivid colors to paint the complexity of her animal subjects’ lives. Each scene she paints feels intimate, as if the viewer could see into the animal's soul.
“There’s just so much going on that we’re so busy, we don’t see. You know we’ll see cows in the pasture, but there’s a whole social thing going on ,” Ballantine Brown said. “It’s fun to paint and educate people.”
However, the number and acreage of ranches in Florida decrease every year. Ballantine Brown’s family ranch in Kissimmee might not exist in a couple of years because her son is getting pushed out, she said.
“All those beautiful horse farms, and they’re putting roads through them,” Ballantine Brown said. “It’s just sad, the whole culture, because how many little pink houses do we need.”
Ballantine Brown is not the only artist who has faced her share of sorrows with development. Padgett said he has witnessed painted scenes disappear before his eyes.
“I sat there on the dock on top of oyster shells and painted a painting,” Padgett said. “Those oyster shells don’t exist there anymore, and that dock doesn’t either, and now you’ve got condos.”
Padgett said he believes development is unavoidable, but a balance must exist.
“I don’t think that development is wrong, but I think you’ve got to have control over development,” Padgett said. “That’s the hardest thing for people to come up with is a good, strategic way of developing so that we can enjoy what drew us here.”
Like many other artists, Ballantine Brown feels she is in a race against time to paint what is being lost. “We better keep painting as fast as we can.”
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