Everglades National Park, West Lake Boardwalk

Jerry Cutler spent decades painting the human figure before exclusively committing himself to the landscape genre in 1989. He considers himself to be a “linear tactile painter,” and believes that what he sees as an artist and translates onto canvases is actually a kind of substitute for touching. Cutler explains, “I want my eyes to hold things and bring them close. I want my eyes to function as a kind of sense of touch. I strive for a strong sense of tactility in the viewer which promotes a kind of intimacy, a kind of closeness.”

Cutler’s passion for capturing intimate glimpses into natural relationships is unusual for most landscape artists. He is not searching for the promontory–some romantic position where the eyes can overlook a vast space and view the subject from far and wide.

Cutler’s paintings jump right out at you and launch what Cutler calls the “Near Sense” where everything is very close; surfaces and edges are emphasized and reemphasized in an almost exacting fashion. Although there are no impressionist clouds in Cutler’s pieces, the artist does somehow introduce a cloud of mystery. Yes, everything is “right there”—but what’s beyond it, what’s within it, and what’s around it remain compelling puzzles for his fans and collectors.

Named Professor Emeritus in 2010 by the University of Florida’s School of Art and Art History, Cutler has been an Artist in Residence at the I-Park Artist Enclave in East Haddam Connecticut, the Eastern Frontier Society on Maine’s Norton Island, and at Florida’s Everglades National Park. His work was selected for publication in New American Paintings, Southern Edition in 2004-2005, and Cutler’s paintings are held in private, public, and museum collections throughout the world.

The artist heartily admits that he is a “tree guy,” and that he never tires of his lifelong study and appreciation of their cylindrical shapes and appealing forms. As a Wisconsin farm boy, Cutler attributes his original connection to the outdoors with spending time with his father and grandfather in the woods. “Even though we’d be both working and playing out there, it was something of a holiday experience for me.”

Cutler’s passion for capturing intimate glimpses into natural relationships is unusual for most landscape artists. “I wasn’t so interested in the big prairies of the Everglades...I was looking for some way to capture the more crowded areas of the Everglades where I could single out something intimate.”

THE ARTIST & THE EVERGLADES

“I wasn’t so interested in the big prairies of the Everglades,” the artist admits, describing how he came upon the mangroves off the West Lake Trail that he painted for the LINC Greater Everglades Art Atlas. “I was looking for some way to capture the more crowded areas of the Everglades where I could single out something intimate.” As a former figurative painter, it’s not surprising that the “tree guy” found a connection with this particular mangrove that highlighted the human body and its movements.

Although Cutler works to complete numerous sketches in the field, the actual painting isn’t started until he’s far away from the source in his Gainesville studio. In this way, his choice of colors, spacing and placement of the sketched objects stem from his overall memory of the scene. While his tree sketches are remarkably faithful, the landscape he paints is in no way photographic. By detailing the landscape of his memory, Cutler’s celebrated process is successful in offering “a way that the eye can not only find the tree and explore it, but be involved in it as well.”

Although Cutler works to complete numerous sketches in the field, the actual painting isn’t started until he’s far away from the source in his Gainesville studio.

At 78” X 78” size, Mangrove Passion is nearly life size. While his style of tracing edges for prominent outlines was historically done in black, Cutler’s experimentation with the mangrove’s bright blue outlines certainly magnifies the mangrove’s personality and emphasizes the sense of action. It’s Cutler’s way of introducing the eye to the tree. The dramatic blues pull the character of one mangrove tree forward without overlooking all the other kinds of colors that are bouncing around the rest of the painting.

“I suppose I don’t do a lot of preaching about the environment,” Cutler admits, but he is interested in bringing nature to people through his art. “I want them to have it, not so much just in their eyes but in the sense of their body. I want my viewers to feel a strong bodily identification with trees and, for me, this particular mangrove subject truly fulfilled that objective.”

MANGROVE SCENE, EVERGLADES NATIONAL PARK

Located seven miles north of the Flamingo Visitor Center, the West Lake Trail in Everglades National Park is a self-guided half-mile of boardwalk that wanders around one of the first in a group of brackish lakes that eventually connect to Florida Bay. The boardwalk provides a shady tunnel through a forest of white, black and red mangroves. In some places, buttonwood trees dot the landscape, colorful varieties of bromeliads paint the canopy overhead, and giant leather ferns carpet the forest floor.

From off shore, the mangrove islands that hedge Florida’s southwestern coast might look like welcoming, verdant lands where fresh water can be found, but everything about these forests is counterintuitive. Half water, half land, mangroves are not made for humans. Found only in the world’s most inhospitable regions, these trees thrive in the harshest of equatorial heat in salt water levels that would kill typical trees. With root systems designed to hold onto whatever they can through whatever storms and tides come their way, mangroves are designed to clutch the shoreline. Over time, their stronghold collects mud and debris, and their persistence helps stabilize the soil. They are Mother Nature’s system for securing shorelines from the tropical storms, and their protective shields buffer inland natural and urban communities from wind and water threats.

Kayakers love to frequent the pathways between southwest Florida’s mangrove forests—collections of mangroves so vast they seems like a land of “ten thousand islands.” But there are no leisurely strolls through mangrove forests without manmade assistance like the park boardwalk. Accessibility through the primeval environment of mangroves requires you to climb over, under and around their tangled roots while also navigating the choking muck.

Despite their inhumane environment of deadly heat, insects and only seasonal freshwater, mangrove forests are the most productive and biologically complex ecosystems on earth. Their canopies provide isolated roosts and nests for seemingly countless varieties of birds and air plants. Their macramé root systems shelter underwater nurseries for young fish, shellfish and other aquatic creatures. Aall of this activity in their prolific rookeries and estuaries also makes these sheltered forests the favorite hunting grounds for everything from fish and insects to snakes and crocodiles.

Cutler’s red mangroves are easy to discern. Known as the “the tree that walks,” the arching roots employed by red mangroves to creep and expand also allow them to survive in inundated areas. Seeming to walk on water, their leggy roots allow the tree to grow in water —even very salty water—because the roots absorb air through pores in their bark known as lenticels. While red mangroves prop themselves up and over the water, black mangroves tend to live on slightly higher ground and their specialized roots grow up and stick out of the salty muck like straws. These straws, known as pneumatophores, are also covered in lenticels.

White mangroves may also have pneumatophores protruding from the ground, but its leaves are rounded at the base and tip and are smooth underneath. Buttonwood trees are also a species of mangrove that features red-brown, cone like fruits that look like buttons. This tree usually grows in a zone adjacent to and just inland from the mangrove zone.

Great Blue Heron

Because she was first taught to see as an environmental field biologist, Charlotte Lykes Jorgenson’s artistic vision comes from a different perspective.

She’s not sure if it makes her a more analytical artist, but she does believe that art and science are deeply connected. “Both require you to be a good observer and to notice details as well as the broader environment,” she contends. “In both disciplines one change affects everything around it.

Realizing that nature itself and the nature journals she kept for over 30 years were her first art teachers, the self taught artist says she is still discovering her artistic voice by “feeling my way with brush, pen, pigment and paper.” As her ideas, prayers and moments of awe and wonder, Jorgenson’s paintings tell not only her story, but other stories as well. “Just as the spiral of a conch shell, a line of poetry, or a ripe garden tomato inspires me to paint, so do acts of human kindness, the sharp sorrow of suffering, and the universal nature of our collected stories.”

Although she currently lives most of the year in Colorado and has traveled all over the world, the fourth generation Floridian has a kindred relationship to Florida that instilled her love of the great outdoors. Wherever she is, the artist is never far from “the field” and surmises that hiking and learning about nature is probably her favorite thing to do. Sometimes when she volunteers as a trail guide, her biology background may come into play, but then again she may ask her hikers to do drawing exercises. “I feel like it gets people to really look closely and appreciate the world around them. The names of things don’t matter as much as just knowing— knowing the value in the beauty of this natural world.”

Her own knowledge of the natural world is continually evolving and intensifying. “I want to know the call of the Red Tail Hawk and the adaptations of mangrove trees that allow them to grow in salt water. I want to remember the smell of myrtle leaves. I love the tiny details of things and they show up in my work.”

Because she was first taught to see as an environmental field biologist, Charlotte Lykes Jorgenson’s artistic vision comes from a different perspective.

THE ARTIST & THE EVERGLADES

Finding the Greater Everglades to be compelling in all its regions, the artist confesses her partiality to the Florida prairie where she grew up in the system’s northern reaches. There the grasslands are dotted with tree islands known as hammocks—islands of slightly higher elevations safe from the seasonal rains that flood the immense lowlands. The high ground of the hammock cultivates dense forests of cabbage palms and cypress, oaks, and pine trees that diversify the distinctive prairie habitat.

“The prairie is big and open like the Great Plains or the African Savannah. The sky and horizon are such strong elements there. Then the hammocks are jungle-like, dense and humid and buggy. Both are full of wildlife and amazing plants— Saw grass with its sharp serrated edges, epiphytes that get all their nutrients from the air and rain, and resurrection ferns that look dead during dry spells and spring back to life when it rains.” There’s no doubt she’s a product of her homeland and it also explains her dual attraction to Colorado, “I grew to love that open sky, that big sky.”

Beyond the bird’s ubiquitous relationship to the Greater Everglades, Jorgenson chose the Great Blue Heron as her subject for the LINC Art Atlas because it also symbolizes the wildlife habitats in the proposed Florida Wildlife Corridor that will hopefully connect wildlife from Florida Bay in the southern Everglades to the Okeefenokee Swamp in Georgia.

While painting her Great Blue Heron Jorgenson was remembering a kayak trip she took in the Ten Thousand Islands region in southwestern Florida– a landscape the artist describes as “full of mangrove islands, open water and so many birds.” Ever the trail guide, she understands the similarities between the northern and southern Everglades and points out that the “mangrove islands in the coastal waters are similar to the islands of trees I love in the northern grasslands.” The biologist seems to understand the ecological connections, while the Florida girl who loves to paint seems to feel the relationships.

Beyond the bird’s ubiquitous relationship to the Greater Everglades, Jorgenson chose the Great Blue Heron as her subject for the LINC Art Atlas because it also symbolizes the wildlife habitats in the proposed Florida Wildlife Corridor that will hopefully connect wildlife from Florida Bay in the southern Everglades to the Okeefenokee Swamp in Georgia. The artist also admits that the majestic bird is also one of her favorite characters. “I love that long supple neck that can bend any which way and the zen-like grace of the Great Blue. It can stand so still. When it walks in the shallows its toes collapse as it raises its foot from the water, so there’s barely a ripple upon leaving or reentering the water.”

While the artist uses a variety of mediums including gouache, acrylic, graphite and wax pencil on paper, she often adds text to her paintings. For the Great Blue painting she chose a poem by Mary Oliver about returning to the sea. In one line the poet reveals she is grateful for the world around her by communicating, “Such grace, thank you.” Jorgenson wrote the words over and over in the painting’s background with a white wax pencil because “When I think about a great blue heron, I think about grace. They’re graceful, they’re beautiful to watch.”