Taylor Hale Studio & Gallery

Taylor Hale grew up in Key Largo and graduated from Coral Shores High School, which makes him a rarity among Keys gallery owners: he is actually from here. He comes from a family of artists going back several generations.

He left to train formally, studying at Ringling College of Art + Design in Sarasota, where Keys painter John David Hawver mentored him, and then earning a bachelor of fine arts from the Rhode Island School of Design. For a while he worked as a portrait painter, running a studio in Dublin, New Hampshire, painting commissioned portraits for New England families, and later painting in St. Augustine.

The work he is known for now started when he moved back to the Keys and took a job waiting tables at Morada Bay. He watched the sunset every shift, began painting the clouds, and never really stopped. Cloudscapes and waterscapes are his subject: summer storm fronts, sunset glow, flat water under a full moon. He works in oil, using alla prima and indirect glazing, and describes the paintings as naturalistic and coloristic, with harmonized palettes of color. Originals and giclée prints are both available.

The studio and gallery sits at 151 Morada Way, Unit 5, behind the Florida Keys Brewing Co. beer garden, in the middle of the Morada Way Arts & Cultural District. The district's Third Thursday Art Walk is the busiest and easiest night to find the door open and the artist in the room.

Hale also puts his work behind the places it comes from. He donates paintings and time to the Coral Restoration Foundation and to Florida Bay Forever. He and his wife Kelly separately own The Hale Gallery, a few miles up the highway in the Ocean Sotheby's building at mile marker 81.8 bayside, which shows rotating exhibitions by local, regional and national artists alongside his own.