Two years ago, artist Leoma Lovegrove lost her world-renowned gallery in Matlacha when Hurricane Ian covered the island with more than 14 feet of storm surge. Rather than simply retire, she decided to relocate to downtown Fort Myers. With the soft opening of her new location on Dean street a mere matter of weeks away, Lovegrove is once again dealing with surge, this time compliments of Hurricane Helene - with her signature buoyant spirit.
“Luckily, we only got like three inches,” said Lovegrove. “They’re just pulling up some baseboards and getting them dried out. And the art will dry out, you know, the canvas and all that, so I got just a little bit … Most of the art was already hung so … well not most of it, but a lot of it. We’re doing good. We got some good help, and yep, we’re doing good.”
At 3,000 square feet, Lovegrove’s Dean Street gallery is nearly four times the size of the one that Ian destroyed on Matlacha Island. And the 30-foot ceilings allow her to display her numerous large-scale paintings salon style.
She can’t wait for everyone to see her new space. In addition to the soft opening for collectors in October, she’s planning another later in the fall, with the official opening coming in February when all the winter residents and tourists have returned to Southwest Florida.
Meanwhile, Lovegrove mops up as she puts a philosophical spin on Helene’s close call.
“My motto’s ‘always forward,’ so, it’s fine,” said Lovegrove. “I feel fortunate, actually. It could have been a lot worse. Like my neighbor. He got five inches. I got three inches. It seems like with all these hurricanes, every inch makes a difference.”
Compared to the 7.82 feet of surge that inundated Fort Myers during Hurricane Ian, the 5.12 inches generated by Helene spared most of the restaurants and shops along First Street. Regrettably, those on Bay and Dean did not fare as well. It wasn’t just that the surge wasn’t as high, but those businesses along First have just that much greater base elevations. Every inch really does make a difference.
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Leoma Lovegrove is known for expressionist works characterized by exuberant strokes (applied to canvas not only via brushes of all sizes and shapes, but also with her fingers and hands as well) and a palette bursting with vivid tropical color.
While she is popularly associated with Florida motifs that include birds, fish, palms and coconuts, Lovegrove easily adapts her quasi-expressionist style to portraiture. Her subjects have included former President Jimmy Carter (who hung his portrait in his presidential library in Atlanta) and Sir Richard Branson (whose portrait was commissioned for Virgin Airlines’ headquarters in London).
The presidential library of George W. Bush also includes Lovegrove’s work, as do the private collections of actress Sharon Stone and actor Jesse Metcalf.
Her work is also included in the White House’s private collection, the Marietta Museum of Art & Whimsy in Sarasota, and other of Lovegrove’s works have graced the windows of New York’s Rockefeller Center.
In 2022, Hurricane Ian devastated Lovegrove’s gallery on Matlacha. The depth of the surge that got inside the gallery topped five feet in some portions of the building. Furniture toppled. The artworks inside were saturated by water and then covered with a thick layer of muck and mud. A mound of debris stretched skyward in the parking lot between the gallery and Pine Island Road.
Lovegrove approximated the value of the paintings inside the gallery at the time Ian struck at $800,000.
“It literally turned my life upside down, inside out, and all around,” Lovegrove said at the time. “This has taught me, massive change can bring massive growth, it we let it. Always Forward.”
And in that vein, in the months following the storm, Lovegrove converted Ian’s flotsam and jetsam into meaningful, memorable works of art. She has since re-opened the Matlacha gallery, although she’s left the walls bare studs and raised all of the electrical outlets and light switches four feet above finished floor elevation “just in case.”
The Matlacha gallery did indeed take on more water during Hurricane Helene, but Lovegrove didn’t provide any details, preferring to focus instead on her gallery in the downtown Fort Myers River District.