“Art doesn't reflect what we see; it makes us see.” – Paul Klee
INTERLACHEN, Fla.— Matt Keene’s Prius looks out of place among the half dozen pickup trucks on the sandy bank of the Ocklawaha River. It looks stranger still when he pops the trunk, heaves out a glass bottle of clear liquid and sets it on the roof.
An acclaimed photographer, journalist and explorer, Keene came to the Ocklawaha from St. Augustine to document its reemergence.
The Rodman/Kirkpatrick Dam, an early piece of the never-completed Cross Florida Barge Canal, flooded this swampy landscape in 1968. The Florida Department of Environmental Protection has coordinated periodic, three-month drawdowns ever since to mimic the river’s natural cycles and kill off aquatic weeds.
When dirt-colored water levels drop, buried springs bubble back to life and sunken cypress seedlings take root. Artists boat, paddle, swim and dive to the fleeting ecosystem, capturing it on canvas in hopes the public will demand its permanent restoration.
Last year, Gov. Ron DeSantis vetoed $6.25 million allocated in the state budget for dam removal. Anglers who prize the reservoir’s bass fishing cast their rods in celebration. River lovers who’ve advocated for removal since the ‘70s sighed at another year of delay.
Last week, Florida legislators again pushed for dam removal, filing the Northeast Florida Rivers, Springs, and Community Investment Act. As they advocate in the capitol, Keene captures the river, using his rooftop bottle of silver nitrate to develop photos taken on the film Canon slung around his neck.
His conservation photography is on display at the Lightner Museum in St. Augustine until Jan. 18, immersing the museum’s 85,000 annual visitors in Florida’s springs and rivers.
“It feels like it's just been ripped out of time,” he says of the Ocklawaha, eyeing thousands of tree trunks snapped off at the same height and preserved by floodwaters. “It's always very surreal and it's always very visceral to come in and experience this place.”
The Reservoir
Florida’s wild waterways have long attracted artists hoping to capture the landscape’s “exotic” mystique. The Ocklawaha River is no exception.
“Sunset on the Ocklawaha River,” an 1892 painting by Baltimore’s Granville Perkins, shows palm trees and Spanish moss dripping over the river. “Ocklawaha River, Sternwheeler,” an 1888 oil painting by Florida snowbird William Aiken Walker, became a popular postcard print, depicting a flamingo gazing at a steamboat cruising down the river.
Today, Keene and his artistic companions Margaret Ross Tolbert and Captain Karen Chadwick face a bloated, brown version of the river their predecessors painted.
A sci-fi-like 306-ton “crusher-crawler” barreled over cypress trees as the dam flooded a forest nearly 10 times the size of Central Park. The skeleton stumps that remained stick up, “like Jolly Green Giant toothpicks,” Chadwick says.
Chadwick graduated with a degree in sculpture from the Ringling College of Art and Design in 1988 and has displayed her work throughout Jacksonville, Tampa and Ocala. When she’s not at the helm, she snaps photos of scenes she’ll later turn into oil paintings or stone sculptures.
“I've never seen a landscape like this ever in my life. It must have been amazing as a forest,” Tolbert says as Chadwick weaves her pontoon boat around cypress stumps.
Keene raises his camera to eye level and snaps a photo of a wood stork balanced on a branch flush with the water’s surface.
Keene has previously filmed two documentaries about the Ocklawaha River: “Lost Springs: An Artist's Journey into Florida's Abandoned Springs” and “River be Dammed: Florida's Forgotten River.” Yet, repetitive cycles of flooding and drawdowns leave the site looking like it did when he first paddled it in 2012.
“The environment wants to recover,” he says, “but every attempt at it gets reduced back to what it has been for the last 60 years.”
Today’s photos are smaller studies for 20-inch “mammoth” tintypes Keene hopes to create before the drawdown’s end in March. Plates of that size require massive, custom cameras that look like black accordions on tripod stilts. Keene is building his camera at home and sports a bandaged right hand to prove it.
Historians credit 19th century nature photographer Carleton Watkins for helping convince President Abraham Lincoln and Congress to establish Yosemite as the nation’s first protected public land in 1864. Watkins’ mammoth shots of Cathedral Rocks, Half Dome and El Capitan drew praise from the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson and landscape painter Albert Bierstadt.
The key to art’s human impact is its psychological vibrancy, says Susan Magsamen, co-author of “Your Brain on Art” and founder of the International Arts + Mind Lab at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
“It turns out that the most salient experiences are these highly aesthetic experiences,” Magsamen said on a TED podcast. “And arts fall into that category.”
To take a photo, Keene dips the plate in syrupy solutions before slotting it into his camera. He develops the picture in a series of chemical baths, all within a pop-up dark room that packs into his Prius.
The process requires water, so Keene often scoops up a sample from the scene itself. Any contaminants in the water wind up in the photo, too.
Phosphorus and nitrogen from decaying plants are the reservoir’s main contaminants.
Dam supporters say removing it would cause phosphorus-fed algae blooms in the lower St. Johns River. A 2016 report by the St. Johns River Water Management District found that the “worst-case” annual influx, “while not insignificant” would be less than the phosphorus pumped into the river by Georgia-Pacific's Palatka paper mill.
“ I think it definitely embraces connection with the viewer because it's a very intimate process,” Keene says of using the river’s waters in his photography. “You can see some of the chemical anomalies of it.”
“For me, the importance of art is really to be able to share your own internal interpretations of things with others and this place is one of the places that I've had the strongest internal connection to,” Keene says. “I think it reveals a lot about Florida, about the history of Florida and about the future of Florida.”
The “Lost Springs”
Eight miles south of and three days after the artists’ trip to Kenwood landing, Gainesville painter Margaret Ross Tolbert dives into the geode pool of Cannon Springs.
She hears the tingle of sand in her ears as it rides jets of groundwater to the surface and falls back down as sparkly underwater snow. A group of tadpoles hiding under a fallen branch draws her snorkel-masked eyes toward the shore. She snaps a photo of them with an underwater camera.
Tolbert floats at the surface of the water, but cypress trees stained with dark water lines from before the drawdown make it seem like she’s much deeper.
Cannon is one of 20 “lost” springs buried under the Ocklawaha’s dammed waters. These portals to the Floridan Aquifer continue to pump out groundwater when covered, but dark, heavy surface waters hide them.
If Keene’s photos immerse, Tolbert’s paintings submerge.
She snaps reference photos underwater and often brings plastic diving slates along for underwater sketches. On the bank or on the boat, she flips open a sketchbook, positions it horizontally and draws without taking her eyes off the scene, two pens in hand.
“Sometimes I like the simplicity and directness of the sketches,” Tolbert says. “For me, that's more of a moment of contact with the experience than even a photograph is.”
Back at her studio, Tolbert fills in the sketches with coffee or watercolors.
She reaches for oil paints of turquoise, indigo and sage for full-sized pieces, often working on canvases too big to fit indoors. A nine-foot study of Cannon Springs leans against her studio wall in late December, immortalizing her earlier plunges.
Once complete, the 30-foot painting will join her 500-plus-piece collection set to be reinstalled and expanded at the Orlando International Airport, where it’s hung since 2011.
Tolbert’s spring paintings hang in Florida museums, courthouses and transit stations, plus buildings around the world, including the U.S. Embassy in Ankara, Turkey. Her 2010 book, AQUIFERious, dedicated to the late cave diver and water advocate Wes Skiles, won gold and silver medals from the Florida Book Awards.
But for as much joy as Tolbert finds in painting the lost springs of the Ocklawaha River, she feels pain, too. At the end of Keene’s “Lost Springs” documentary, which follows Tolbert as she chronicles an earlier drawdown, the artist pours red-brown shellac over a vibrant blue scene of Cannon Springs.
“The Kirkpatrick Dam casts a dark shadow on Cannon Springs. The painting would not be complete without the weight of that shellac on top of it,” she narrates. “And yet after I did it, it bothered me for days.”
“It felt almost like a talisman that makes [the springs’ disappearance] happen,” she said at the Kenwood ramp, reflecting on the moment eight years later.
What will it feel like if the dam is removed, the waters recede and Tolbert no longer has to douse her paintings in brown?
“ To see this whole landscape come to life almost like it's new creation or something…that'll be an incredible day,” she said. “The world will note this.”
The Confluence
Farther south still, the springfed waters of the Silver River meet the Ocklawaha River in a stubborn faceoff of color. Ten artists peek over the side of the boat, cameras, phones and sketchbooks in hand.
Captain Karen Chadwick is at the helm again, this time leading a charter for artists hoping to submit their work to an exhibit sponsored by the Marion Cultural Alliance: “Reunite the Rivers – Art of the Ocklawaha and Silver Springs.”
The exhibit’s title, also the name of an advocacy coalition, refers to the fact that the Rodman/Kirkpatrick dam blocked the Ocklawaha River’s natural connection to the St. Johns River. Supporters say breaching the dam would restore a 217-mile river system spanning the Green Swamp to the Atlantic Ocean.
Unlike Keene and Tolbert, longtime champions of dam removal, most of the artists joining Chadwick for this tour are new to the dam’s controversy. Florida Defenders of the Environment, an organization founded by Marjorie Harris Carr to oppose the barge canal, paid their way.
“We want to showcase what drawdown looks like so that it can be available to a wider audience, an audience that might not be able to go out directly to see it,” said Nina Bhattacharyya, the organization's executive director. “Art is such a wonderful way to do it.”
“I didn't know the history of the disturbances to the natural flow of things,” said Esta Mann, a figurative artist in Marion County, while aboard the boat. “This is eye-opening for me, so I'm hoping the same can happen, you know, once the art is exhibited.”
Organizers anticipate 20 to 40 artists will submit work to the exhibit, which will be on display from Feb. 6 to 28 at the Brick City Center for the Arts in Ocala.
“A lot of times when we talk about these spaces for restoration, it can be in technical terms,” Bhattacharyya said. “Art can really bring science and policy to life.”
To explore the artists’ work:
- Margaret Ross Tolbert - Facebook
- Matt Keene - Website - Facebook
- Karen Chadwick - Website
- Esta Mann - Artist profile
- Marion Cultural Alliance
