Ocean Blue Galleries Key West

Ocean Blue Galleries Key West opened on May 1, 2021, at 109 Duval Street, at the harbor end of the street near Mallory Square. It is one of three Ocean Blue galleries, with the others in St. Petersburg and Winter Park, and it filled a gap left when several Key West galleries closed during the pandemic. A number of the artists on the wall came to Ocean Blue for exactly that reason.

The collection is built on recognizable names rather than regional landscape work. The gallery holds an authorized Dr. Seuss collection, drawn from the artist’s classic drawings and completed illustrations, and it represents Tom Everhart, who worked directly with Charles Schulz and whose paintings grew out of the Peanuts world. James Coleman, who painted background scenery at Disney before turning to fine art, paints Key West scenes. Nano Lopez makes brightly patinated bronze animal sculptures. The Borowski brothers make illuminated glass animals. Anna Sweet works in underwater photography and ocean imagery finished in poured resin, which is the part of the gallery that most lives up to the name.

Across the room that means a genuinely wide range of media: original paintings, bronze and mixed-media sculpture, art on metal, studio glass, poured-resin photography and limited-edition prints. Other represented artists include Stephen Muldoon, Shawn Mackey, Jeff Vermeeren, Brittany Newman, Marty Goldstein and Guy Vasilovich, an illustrator and syndicated cartoonist who came out of Walt Disney Animation.

The gallery frames in house and ships fully insured within the United States and overseas, which matters for sculpture and glass in particular. It also stages live painting events with visiting artists, including during Fantasy Fest, so there are evenings when the work is being made in front of you.