Andy Thurber had an inauspicious start to his career as an artist.
“I got kicked out of Mary Immaculate (School) for drawing a mockingbird that was outside the classroom window,” he said.
He told me this the other day, as we were hiding from the sun under the bus shelter at the corner of Truman and Whitehead.
Thurber had an easel in front of him that held a large sheet of watercolor paper, on which was an image of the lighthouse and its surroundings made up of his signature wild and loose colors and shapes. He was using one of his finer brushes to add some last bits of flora and fauna in the foreground. Getting kicked out of Catholic school may have felt like a serious disruption to the arc of his education, but it didn’t really hold him back.
“I recovered,” he said.
It became pretty clear that no one was going to stop Andy Thurber from making art.
Thurber isn’t a Conch, technically – he moved to Key West when he was 6 months old – but his work is steeped in cuzzy bubba lore and tradition.
His style is fast and impressionistic. He isn’t a realist, but he paints a Key West far more real than most. He includes the obviously beautiful, such as poinciana trees, Conch houses, fish, birds, ships, lighthouses, azure oceans, sunsets and tourist-friendly spots like the Armory on White Street and the Schooner Wharf Bar. But he also paints the grittier elements – guys in white shrimper boots, stacks of crab traps, guys with power washers, drunks passed out in doorways and old-school Key West characters with names like Cigarette Willie, the Cookie Lady, Meathead and Toad. Bum Farto is a recurring character, as are chickens, women on bikes, and the convent at Mary Immaculate.
His first mentor just after high school was Sanford Birdsey, a well known Key West watercolorist who had a studio on Eaton Street and who, for a small fee, led burgeoning painters out on plein air (outdoor) expeditions around the island.
“Sanford, she would charge $10 or $20 per student. I paid $20 the first day. And the next time I came back, she wouldn’t take my money. She wouldn’t take my money from then on. She put me under her wing,” Thurber said.
“Me and Martha de Poo and Sanford would paint every Saturday and every Wednesday for about five years,” he said.
Early on, Thurber remembered her saying, “‘Andy, here’s the thing about watercolorists – they make all kinds of rules. And I break every damn one of them.’ After that, we were best friends. Because she wasn’t a purist.”
Whereas most painters will edit out things like power lines, Thurber puts them in, often as a place for birds to rest. (Looking at his lighthouse painting, I asked if one of the birds was a white-crowned pigeon. “It could be,” he said.)
Occasionally, when he’s out painting on the street, tourists will ask if they can buy what he’s working on, though they tend to fade into the background when he tells them what his work sells for, currently at Stone Soup Gallery and the Key West Art Center.
“Sometimes it’s not even about the painting,” he said, as he was packing up his easel for the morning. “I just enjoy studying people so much. I could spend the whole day just looking at people. You’re able to catch their mannerisms and everything when you paint.”
While painting makes up a large portion of Thurber’s oeuvre, the other significant part is woodcarving. He teaches classes in it at The Studios of Key West, and he’s a charter member of the Key West Woodcarving Society. He was actually leaving Whitehead Street to go hang pieces by a dozen or so artists from the society for an opening at Williams Hall on Fleming Street. (The show is up until April 30.)
Thurber started his woodcarving work in his mid 20s, partly inspired by his wife’s stepfather, who used to carve small Christian-themed figurines. He is mostly self-taught, but his lodestar in the four decades since has been the famed Key West folk artist Mario Sanchez.
“He was a wild man,” Thurber said, talking about how Sanchez would carve on whatever scraps of wood he could find with tools he made out of things like old sharpened screwdrivers.
“Everyone can do a bird, or they’ll do a turtle or a fish, an item. That’s kind of cool when you start out. But what Mario did, he was like a historian. He gave us a whole generation of what it was like to live in Key West before us,” he said. “It is generational. It really is. It’s handed down. It’s one of the island’s oldest traditions. ”
Thurber knew Sanchez when he was alive, but his appreciation has only deepened in recent years working with curator Cori Convertito at the Key West Art & Historical Society, with a collection that contains more than 150 of his carvings and sketches.
“I had my arms around Marios all day. We took everything out of the archives and put it in the library. So I got to hold every one of them. Amazing. I didn’t know they had that many,” he said. “I got to be around them all day.”
Thurber, a noted early riser, just officially retired from Art & Historical. The other morning, when his alarm went off at 5:30, after resisting it for 65 years, he said, “You know what? Snooze.”
He’s looking forward to making art full-time. And to teaching more woodcarving classes.
He said a few of the other woodcarvers are worried about him sharing his knowledge because it’ll bring more competition into their niche market.
“They’ll go, ‘Thurb, why are you teaching everybody how to do that?’” he said.
“I go, because I like to share the love,” he said. “Artists teach artists. That’s how we all learn.”
