Pat Burgess, the owner of Salt Creek Artworks, doesn’t have
a favorite painter.
She likes Cezanne, whose home she saw on a group tour of France
earlier this year. She likes that other impressionist painter who cut his ear
off. She is 68 years old. She likes what she likes and she doesn’t know what
that is.
“I have no clue about art,” says Burgess, walking through
her gallery. “Maybe it’s the expression of the face or the eyes. The sadness.
Maybe I can relate.”
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ADDITIONAL CONTENT |
Click here to meet three Salt Creek artists and see their work.
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Burgess walks in small, slow steps. The current show is by a
long-time Salt Creek artist. Every once in a while, when her vision blurs or
her eyes itch, she removes her glasses and rubs her eyes. She likes his
paintings, the flamboyant colors, but she can’t afford them.
Burgess inherited Salt Creek
Artworks when her parents, Dorothy and Azell Prince, died nearly two years ago.
Since then she has taken on all the responsibilities of running a full-time
business, without much guidance.
Like her father, Burgess never knew much about art.
The Prince family turned the
former maritime factory, which was then a furniture store, into an arts complex
14 years ago. It was not their idea. They never planned to run it themselves.
But after a business partnership fell through and zoning regulations prevented
them from changing their plans, the Princes decided to give it a try.
Azell
Prince was most involved from the beginning. The last-known living employee of
Thomas Edison, Azell spent most of his life performing clerical work, said his
daughter. Burgess grew close to her father after her two brothers went to
military school. She was there to help Azell when he began work on Salt Creek
in 1993 at 78 years of age.
Azell
quickly befriended the first artists to rent studio space and enlisted their
help. Together they ripped up dirty carpets,
installed tiles and built studio walls. A contractor repaired the plumbing and
electricity. Azell himself installed track lights and painted the galleries.
The space was his, but he gave artistic ownership to his tenants.
“He didn’t know anything about
art. If it was up to him it would have been seagulls and beach scenes,”
said Lance Rodgers, a painter and Azell’s appointed curator. “One of the things
I loved about Azell is that he gave us space, he gave us freedom.”
After retirement, Azell was
left with free time on his hands and looked to Salt Creek for friendships.
Dorothy had begun to develop Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes and lose her
eyesight. Burgess knew her father liked spending time away.
“To be perfectly frank, I
think he liked being around the people,” Burgess said. “My mother was not
well.”
In February 2005, after
weeks in the hospital, Dorothy moved permanently into her daughter’s home. By
then Azell was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Both he and Dorothy became
bedridden. Burgess pushed Azell’s and Dorothy’s beds together, their heads on
opposite ends, so that Azell could watch his wife as she died. They were there
for months, until June, when Dorothy passed away.
Three months later, he was gone too.
“I know it’s crazy to be so attached to your parents,” said
Burgess. “But I had to take care of them and watch them die. And that was
horrible.”
Now Burgess lives alone. In the past, Burgess and her
parents drove from St. Petersburg
to New Hampshire to escape the Florida
summer sun. Burgess no longer makes the trip. She has work to do. She has to
send out mailings, meet with tenants and pay the bills.
“So far the building is paying for itself,” said Burgess, a
former real estate agent. She now relies on Social Security benefits and a
small paycheck from Salt Creek to get by. “We have never made a profit.”
There are 42 studios at Salt Creek and currently eight
vacancies, although sometimes Burgess has trouble keeping track of the exact
number.
“It gets so that you know some people better than others,”
she said. “And then they get behind in their rent, and then collecting rent
gets to be a real obstacle.”
Sometimes tenants leave their spaces without any notice.
Sometimes they hang on without paying. Despite the bad track record, Burgess
does not have a process for selecting renters, except for one stipulation --
she has to like them.
If they say they can pay the rent, that’s good enough for
her. She does not always like the art, but she never censors the artists.
“Lance did some of this radical stuff, with flags and skulls
and bare boobs,” Burgess said. “I didn’t understand any of it.” Still, Burgess
trusts Rodgers, who curates all of the gallery’s shows. The economy is hard on
artists, she said. She understands.
On Friday morning, despite
“bum knees,” Burgess makes the trek up the stairs to show a studio to a
potential tenant -- a woman from England
who describes herself as a “starving artist.”
Burgess unlocks the door and peers inside. “This stuff was
supposed to be out a while ago,” she says, to a roomful of boxes and bags. The
artist is silent.
“Oh, well. I don’t care. I’m
easy to get along with,” Burgess says.
She closes the door and
walks around the corner to another empty room, this one occupied by cobwebs.
The artist decides to take it. Back downstairs, Burgess sits beneath a portrait
of her father, painted over 30 years ago.
“One of the things that keeps me going is him,” she said.
“Daddy. And what this meant to him. Because he loved it. Neither of us knew
he’d love it so much.”
Burgess is not crazy about the painting. Maybe it’s because
the artist cut out her mother from the picture. Maybe it doesn’t have enough
color.
Or maybe this time, as her voice breaks, it’s not about the
art.
