INSPIRATION / ART & TRAVEL
Roger Bansemer
Take the
paintbox
along.
From a Florida shoreline to the Titanic, an artist keeps finding something worth looking at. Then he makes room for us to learn.
By Rob Urban
An artist can find plenty to paint in St. Augustine without leaving town. Roger Bansemer has also taken his work to the wreck of the Titanic. His range of possible painting locations is, by ordinary standards, excessive.
On a 2005 expedition, Bansemer brought paintings and prints into a Mir submersible and added finishing touches while it hovered over the ship’s bow. He had first visited the wreck in 2000. His account of those expeditions describes an artist trying to bring something personal back from a place almost nobody gets to see firsthand.
That curiosity also turns up much closer to home: in Florida landscapes, lighthouse books, and the public television series he produces with Sarah Bansemer. A deep-ocean expedition makes a remarkable story. The quieter achievement is how much of his working life he has spent helping other people look at their own surroundings with greater interest.
A working artist,
before the cameras.
Bansemer grew up in Clearwater and studied at the Ringling School of Art and Design in Sarasota. His subsequent Navy service included work as an illustrator and draftsman for a service magazine. Florida’s Artists Hall of Fame biography places that early combination of art, travel, and observation within a career that eventually earned him induction in 2024.
Illustration is a useful beginning for someone who will later explain painting. It demands decisions. Which detail carries the information? What can be simplified? Where should the eye go first? A drawing has to communicate with someone who does not already possess everything its maker knows.
Bansemer’s curiosity has given his career several distinct directions. His own biography describes a substantial abstract period during the 1970s, alongside the landscapes, wildlife, shorebirds, and nautical subjects associated with his later work. He also became a hot-air balloon pilot and made a book from that experience. Other books explored Southern shores, the Smoky Mountains, and southeastern lighthouses.
There is a recurring relationship here between going somewhere and making something. Travel supplies the encounter; painting and writing give it a form someone else can enter. That does not require an exotic destination. A lighthouse is both a striking shape and a piece of working coastal history. Painting it invites attention to the structure and to the place that made it necessary.
He was sharing his practice locally long before the television series began. Selected as Clearwater’s first artist in residence, he hosted open studios and organized a drawing group. Those gatherings and the later television program belong to the same long effort: opening the door to a practice that can otherwise look rather mysterious from outside.
One harbor.
Two ways
of seeing it.
Painting and Travel with Roger and Sarah Bansemer began distribution through public television in 2011. Roger paints, working in oils and acrylics. Sarah explores the locations and subjects, adding the human and historical context around the picture.
That division gives the program room to breathe. A landscape does not appear in a vacuum. Someone lives there, works there, preserves something there, or remembers what used to stand there. Sarah’s contribution allows the place to remain a place, with its own stories, while Roger shows how it becomes a painting.
The Cape Porpoise episode description offers a lovely example. Roger paints from a floating dock in Maine while Sarah talks with a third-generation lobsterman. The water is a subject for one conversation and a livelihood in the other. Giving both a place in the program lets the harbor become more interesting.
Let someone else
catch up to the brush.
In a 2020 Historic Coast Culture interview, Bansemer said he generally paints without consciously describing his process. Filming changes that: he puts the process into words for viewers.
That is a generous extra task to take on. A practiced hand can make a decision before a beginner knows there was a decision to make. Explaining it creates a moment in which somebody else can catch up. I admire the willingness to open that private, familiar activity to someone who is still finding their way.
The format also lets viewers see choices that a finished canvas conceals. A painting on a wall offers the result. Instruction can expose the sequence: an initial arrangement, large areas of color, changes in emphasis, the point at which a detail helps or starts making trouble. For a beginner, that sequence can be more useful than another reminder that talented people exist.
There is no universal deadline for that beginning. Retirement does not automatically produce an artist, any more than buying hiking boots produces a hiker. Someone still has to pick up the brush. A teacher who makes the first steps understandable can help turn a vague intention into an afternoon actually spent painting.
An orchid.
A Model T.
A sundae.
The twelfth season announcement, posted in June 2025, gives a good sense of the Bansemers’ appetite for subjects. Its thirteen episodes include orchids, a palm forest, a 1911 Model T Hack, and an ice-cream sundae. Florida locations include Salt Run and Daytona Beach. There is also a visit with an abstract artist.
That is a pleasingly unpretentious range. The sundae has as much right to be looked at as the old automobile. Each presents a different problem of shape, surface, light, and color. The invitation is simply to notice what is there.
It also makes the teaching less restrictive. Someone unmoved by a particular landscape may be drawn to flowers or machinery. A viewer who assumes that painting must mean one specific kind of picture gets several counterexamples. Curiosity has more entry points when the subject matter stays open.
What comes back
from the journey.
The Titanic expedition remains the most startling example of Bansemer carrying his practice somewhere unusual. His account includes another small object besides the paintings: decorated foam cups sent down outside the pressurized compartment, returning dramatically compressed. An ordinary material became a physical reminder of the environment the expedition had entered.
His book Journey to Titanic, with a foreword by James Cameron, gave the experience a longer life. Paintings, words, and artifacts offer different routes into an event. Each preserves a different part of what the journey meant to the person who made it.
Back in St. Augustine, the same attention has an accessible local expression. Bansemer’s 2025 exhibition at Mission Nombre de Dios brought landscape painting into a free public exhibition. The setting was close to home, and visitors could encounter the work without boarding anything more elaborate than their own car.
Across those distances, a paintbox provides a useful continuity. The artist still has to choose a view, make marks, and decide what deserves to stay. The location can be astonishing; the work remains work.
Bansemer offers an inviting next step: look at the available episodes, choose a subject that catches your attention, and notice how the picture develops. There is a lifetime of travel behind his instruction. The materials for your own beginning may already be in a drawer.
About Roger and Sarah Bansemer
Who are Roger and Sarah Bansemer?
Roger Bansemer is a painter and author based in St. Augustine, Florida. He and Sarah Bansemer independently produce Painting and Travel with Roger and Sarah Bansemer, combining art instruction with stories about the places they visit.
What does Sarah Bansemer contribute to Painting and Travel?
Sarah explores locations and interviews people connected with the subjects Roger paints, giving viewers human and historical context alongside the painting instruction.
When did Roger Bansemer enter the Florida Artists Hall of Fame?
Roger Bansemer was inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame in 2024.
Sources: Roger Bansemer’s expedition account, biography and exhibition notes; the Florida Department of State; the Bansemers’ program pages; Arizona Public Media; Historic Coast Culture’s 2020 interview; and Noah Hertz and Dan Scanlan’s 2024 reporting for Jacksonville Today. Reflections on looking, painting and teaching are Rob Urban’s.
For more of Rob’s writing and approach to consulting, meet Rob.