CHRISTOPHER STILL / THE INSPIRATION SERIES
Look again.
It’s Florida.
A bait bucket. An underwater painting box. History surrounding a legislative chamber. Christopher Still makes the familiar worth our full attention.
By Rob Urban
The subject
was already here.
An inexpensive bait bucket is an unlikely object around which to build an artistic argument. That is part of its appeal.
Christopher Still has described a turning point in his work that involved painting familiar Florida fishing objects with techniques associated with European painting. The subject included an ordinary plastic bucket, fish and the other things someone might recognize from a day near the water. He had trained seriously, traveled and learned from older traditions. He wanted to bring that knowledge home.
In his Fluent in Floridian interview, Still recalled the challenge of convincing people that familiar Florida subjects deserved the same artistic seriousness they readily granted to European scenes. The problem was partly one of attention. People could travel a long way to admire something while overlooking what was nearby.
Still’s career has been an extended answer. From Tarpon Springs to the Florida House of Representatives, he has painted the state’s landscapes, history and ordinary objects with an insistence that familiarity is no reason to stop looking.
A teacher saw
what might follow.
Still grew up in Dunedin, where the art center became part of his early education. In its account of his 2016 Patron of the Arts Award, the Dunedin Fine Art Center credits instructor Larry White with encouraging him to enter the Scholastic Art Awards competition. His success brought a full scholarship to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
His education expanded to include study in Europe and human anatomy at Jefferson Medical School. His own biography identifies an apprenticeship in Florence among the experiences that developed his command of traditional techniques.
The combination helps explain the kind of painter he became. Observation and historical curiosity sit beside a substantial interest in how a picture is physically made. An object can be rendered carefully and also carry a story. A landscape can be a place and a record of what has happened there.
I admire the generosity of using demanding training to examine a subject an audience already knows. The artist is not asking viewers to acquire a new set of cultural credentials before they are allowed to recognize what is in front of them. He is asking them to recognize it more fully.
That can be a surprisingly difficult request. Familiarity makes us efficient. We see the orange, the boat, the bird, and move on. A painting can slow that process down.
THE TOOLS OF ATTENTION
Under water.
Eye level.
Among the objects in the Tarpon Springs Heritage Museum exhibition is a tool that makes Still’s commitment to looking unusually tangible: an underwater painting box.
Curator Lynn Whitelaw describes the watertight container Still developed to make studies while submerged. The painter changes his own working conditions to meet the subject where it lives.
I like the practical ingenuity in that. An artistic ambition becomes a problem somebody has to solve: how to work with paint while surrounded by water. The apparatus is part of the attention, a way to make the encounter possible.
Seeing the box beside the paintings gives the finished work another dimension. The artist’s preparation includes a willingness to be physically inconvenienced by the thing he wants to understand. The water is more than a beautiful subject viewed from a comfortable distance.
History in the room
where decisions happen.
Still’s ten paintings for the Florida House chamber are among his most consequential public works. The commission, undertaken beginning in 1999 and completed in 2004, placed Florida’s history and natural environments around the people conducting its legislative business.
Placing historical figures in a legislative chamber gives the paintings an unusual audience and the setting a particular charge. The past is represented as a presence in a room concerned with the future.
The project also demanded more time and resources than an uncomplicated commission narrative would suggest. Still has discussed the support of patrons who purchased studies as he continued the work. The public result depended on a wider circle of people willing to help make it possible.
In curator Lynn Whitelaw’s discussion of Still’s work, To Have and Have Not provides a good example of his layered approach. References to the Overseas Railway, citrus, sponge diving and cigar production bring different parts of Florida’s history into one composition. Still has also used local residents as models, linking a large historical project to people in his own community.
The details reward a second look because they have relationships to one another. A viewer can begin with a recognizable figure or object and then discover another route through the picture. The painting becomes an invitation to ask why something is there.
That is a demanding form of storytelling. Too little detail and the work can become a generic historical scene. Too much, without compositional judgment, and the image becomes a crowded illustration. Still’s ambition is to let the picture hold together while allowing the references to unfold over time.
Before the finished color,
the patient decisions.
At the Tarpon Springs Heritage Museum, The Great State of Florida brings original works and large reproductions together with materials explaining Still’s process. The permanent exhibition includes tools, documentary material and short videos in which the artist discusses individual pieces.
That combination gives visitors access to more than a succession of completed pictures. They can encounter some of the decisions and preparation behind them. It is a useful way to present an artist whose work contains so much that a quick glance can miss.
Whitelaw’s account also describes the large charcoal study for Beautiful and Historic Tarpon Springs. Before the finished color painting, there was the work of organizing light, shade, figures and detail at scale. The study makes that development visible.
A finished painting can conceal how many decisions it contains. Seeing a preparatory work restores some of them. The artist had to decide where the eye would move, what needed emphasis and which relationships would carry the scene. Those choices are part of the achievement, even when the viewer ultimately experiences the result as a single image.
The pleasure
of looking again.
Still’s public commissions reach places such as Tampa International Airport and Clearwater’s Ruth Eckerd Hall. Art encountered in those settings enters a different kind of day. Someone may arrive for a flight or a performance and leave having noticed something they did not expect to think about.
There is a connection to Xavier Cortada’s Miami work, despite the differences in their methods. Both take Florida as a subject requiring sustained attention, and both put art into settings where it can become part of public life. The state supplies much more than scenery.
What moves me in Still’s work is the respect embedded in that attention. He brings the full weight of his training to a place that many viewers already call home. A familiar object is allowed complexity. A local history is given space. A landscape becomes worth stopping for.
The bait bucket is a good place to begin. It is ordinary enough to test whether we mean what we say about valuing the world around us. Still gives it the painter’s full ability. The rest of us get the pleasure of looking again.
Spend more time with the work.
The Tarpon Arts exhibition page explains what is on view and provides current visitor information. Explore the artist’s own website for more about his work.
Sources: Christopher Still’s biography and Fluent in Floridian interview; the Florida Department of State; Dunedin Fine Art Center; Tarpon Arts; and Lynn Whitelaw’s Creative Pinellas essay. Checked September 2026. Reflections are Rob Urban’s.