Dowager art

Everglades City’s hefty first piece of public sculpture, freshly painted in colors chosen by a famous artist, received its christening Saturday: a drenching from Tropical Storm Alberto.

It’s quirkily fitting for the angular, two-story structure. Until two months ago it was an abandoned boat lift at the dock of the Rod & Gun Club. Even the artist, Kenneth Noland, is zen about the wet welcome given its completion: “Life goes on,” he said.

Noland lives in Maine, painting color-centric canvases that can command prices twice the $36,000 median income in the village where the new sculpture is located. In the late 1980s, however, he spent vacations in an Everglades City house, a jumping-off place from where he and friends would chase snook, but likely catch “croakers and wigfish,” Noland recalled.

“Fifteen years ago, it was just wilderness. There were a lot of different kinds of animals and lots of kinds of fish,” he recalled. “I thought it was great.”

It was also the opposite pole, both figuratively and literally, from high-power galleries and exhibitions in institutions such as Musee National d’Art Moderne in Paris and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Both own Noland works; his paintings are in the collections of museums across the U.S. and in Canada, Germany and the Netherlands.

The untitled sculpture on the bank of the Barron River that girdles the town won’t get such metropolitan audiences. U.S. Census Bureau estimates from 2004 nudged the population of Everglades City barely over 510. Even during the winter fishing season, its population probably doesn’t top 2,000 at any one time until the fragrant weekend of the Seafood Festival each February.

Its frontier spirit and slightly shady history as a smuggling port have endeared Everglades City to writers and artists. All of them have relaxed in the same casual courtesy — no awe, and no questions — that anyone who rolls into town gets. Among the better known visitors are novelist Ernest Hemingway and rubber-mouthed Rolling Stone Mick Jagger. British sculptor Sir Anthony Caro, a friend of Noland, put together a good-sized sketchbook while he was staying here. Several novelists have holed up, and others may be still holed up, in its stilted houses.

It was an art collector, however, who gave voice to the potential of the aged crane, with its peeling Erector-set aesthetics. Olga Hirshhorn and her late husband, Joseph, for whom the Washington, D.C., museum is named, were spending weekends there as long ago as 1969. Hirshhorn noticed the aging lift last spring.

“I thought, what a wonderful piece of found sculpture,” she recalled, “and I thought about Kenneth because he’s all about color.”

She told a friend; the friend told Noland; the two talked.

“I remembered that old crane, which was really derelict and falling apart,” Noland agreed. “It struck me right away. I’d always thought of it as a piece of sculpture.”

Naples anglers Josiah and Diane Hatt took photos from a number of angles to ship to Noland, and the rest was history. In fact, it is better chronicled history than the pedigree of the boat lift. The old structure had people who think they know it scratching their heads.

Hotelier Marty Bowen remembers the Alliance Machine Co., the lodge’s former owners, installed it, but not much more beyond the labor-intensive operation of the crane.

“People wanted to come in and out all hours sun up to sun down. And it was expensive to have someone there to handle. it for one or two boats,” he said. In the winter, the operator had the opposite problem: “If it were February or March, there’d be a line of 20 or 30 waiting to get in.”

The family stopped using the crane when the combination of expenses and potential accidents with the rig overrode its popularity; a boat launch was installed to serve the same function a bit less dramatically.

Bowen’s family bought the Rod & Gun Club in 1973 as a haven from Naples when winter crowds began to permanently bulk up the city. The 17-room hotel’s lobby is a work of art itself, a cool cavern of a room with a maple-syrup patina on its planked floor. Gilded fishes, swimming silently along its wood-paneled walls, register eternal surprise, and a bobcat regards visitors with a frozen snarl from one end of the hall.

Bowen and his sister, Patty, gave permission for the painting of the boat crane, even though he wasn’t sure what the outcome would be.

“It’d be an eye-catcher. Something out of the ordinary,” he mused. “I could see where people might want to do something like that.”

Donnie Seabury, a local remodeler and one time commercial fisherman who doesn’t even remember the boat lift in use, was more cautious in his appraisal before be began applying the eight-color scheme: “It’ll be really interesting,” he said at the time. “I don’t know if I have an opinion on it because it’s really off the wall to me.”

Even the Naples artist called in to supervise the color matches for Noland’s photocopied sketches, Paul Arsenault, says his art is from a different sensitivity.

“It’s a very odd thing to consider this wreck of crane suddenly being deemed a ready-made art object. But that’s what they were proposing, and everyone seemed great about it,” said Arsenault, whose realistic works tend toward subtropical landscapes with a wash of sunlight.

The two sized each other up over a drink at the Rod & Gun Club during Noland’s last visit there.

“He said, ‘Oh, you’re one of those old-style traditional painters,’” Arsenault recalled. “I said, ‘Yeah, you’re one of those abstract guys from the Fifties.’”

That didn’t mean he wasn’t excited about working with Noland, whose name was legend even back when Arsenault was in art school.

“Once you establish your corner of the art world you go your way together,” he explained. But he added “It was like this veil of the esteemed art world being thrown open for you.”

Arsenault was an exacting executor of Noland’s color scheme. The eight DuPont industrial colors Noland had selected — ranging from white to orange, red, green and a purplish tone referred to as “strong blue” — weren’t all easily located without a color specialist at the company’s headquarters. Even as Seabury painted last week, he was waiting on one tone buried within the specialty paint department’s formulas that Arsenault and Noland wanted.

The result exceeded Seabury’s hopes: “I’ve had people come up and tell me how great it is. They really like it. It’ll put us on the map,” he said happily.

True to the heritage of Everglades City nonchalance, residents questioned hadn’t actually gone to see the piece yet.

Neapolitans Dick and Barbara Kearney, who own a fishing house nearby and had contributed to the painting, were planning to drive out to see it this week. But a few Everglades City questioned about it seem to see the reborn crane as the potential for a happy surprise some day when they’re at that end of Broadway Street.

“I’d like to see it sometime,” offered Carol Moseman, president of the Friends of the Museum of the Everglades.

Noland hopes they like it. They will be seeing it for a long time.

“This particular paint I selected is an epoxy paint,” he said. “The colors are basically on one other piece I made, and put this paint on, probably 10 to 15 years ago, and it’s still just fine.This is fairly permanent.”