I apologize, readers; I am running way behind. This happens every season. The events of the cooler months gallop past me. I keep up for a while, but then, one little stumble — one lost afternoon when cousin Greg shows up with his wife, best friend and best friend’s wife and… well, the work I had scheduled falls behind.

Of course, this time of year, with winter blizzards and frozen floods raking the “temperate” zone, all my mid-latitude friends and family will turn up on the gangplank. So now the end of the season is looming and I’m panicked — there is so much I haven’t seen or done!

Fortunately, both the downtown theatres have another play — I haven’t even mentioned them lately. We’ll be getting to that soon.

Meanwhile, one of the most active places in town:

TSKW – Part 1
The Actual studios at The Studios of Key West

I’m curled up on a shaded wooden bench in the breezy sculpture garden of The Studios of Key West. A grey cat has consented to my presence.

Inside the landmark Armory Building, a workshop has just concluded. Lauren McAloon, facilities coordinator, is quietly, efficiently moving chairs around. Folding up the workshop tables and moving the flowers to the side. She is preparing the room for the regular Wednesday evening figure drawing session. The figure drawing session will be next week’s subculture tour.

This week I wandered through the second floor artist studios — the actual studios that give the organization its name. Director Eric Holowacz has his office up there on the south side of the building, overlooking the sculpture garden. He is looking forward to the upcoming transformation Rick Worth has planned for the office. It includes a picket fence wainscoting, a tree and some grass so the office will have the ambience of the out-of-doors. The window by his desk overlooks the sculpture garden where I am sitting with my laptop.

Lauren McAloon in her studio

In the northwest corner, McAloon shares a tiny light-filled studio with 15-year-old Jean Azard, recipient of the Budding Artist Scholarship Fund award. Manifestations of McAloon’s unusual perception of her surroundings hint at sculptures to come.

Perhaps this balmy, low humidity 74-degree sunny day under a brilliant blue sky with soft white puffy clouds makes everything seem peaceful and glorious, but the studios, strewn with tools, project parts and starts, and reference materials have a fresh, expansive feeling in spite of their small size and visual clutter.

Marc Caren was pondering recently finished work when I encountered him. Caren has been in Key West two decades and has a recognizable body of oil paintings that feature perfect drawing, and sophisticated painting techniques. The lively surface textures make his work a rich viewing experience. The colors in recent paintings are more vivid and warmer in tone than his early work.

“I had a studio on the south side of the building,” said Caren, “but the sun was always changing, creating glares and shadows. Now I have a north light studio and it’s always like this,” he said gesturing toward the soft reflected glow saturating the room.

Downstairs, Elena Devers mans the entry while quietly wreaking PR order from a chaos of materials. Always calm and always efficient, Devers is the sunny face of TSKW.

Studio residents currently include, in addition to McAloon and Caren:

writer Mark Hedden, and artists Debra Yates, Letty Nowak Peter Vey, Marky Pierson, Andy Thurber, Guillermo Orozco and Sherry Sweet Tewell.

The Studios of Key West is at the corner of Southard Street and White Street in Key West and also at: www.tskw.org.

Reen Stanhouse with nearly finished cat and rooster for the Gato Pocket Park conch house.

Iron artist Reen Stanhouse just got her studio up and running again after the 2005 hurricane season.  She crafts neo-art nouveau metal gates, stair rails and other architectural and sculptural items from music stands to elevator doors.  The concrete block studio at the “Magic Ranch” on Ramrod Key is perfect for processes that involve welding and pounding heavy objects.

After Hurricane Wilma’s storm surge, the insurance inspector looked at her numerous pieces of large, complex machinery rusted into expensive scrap from salt water flooding and queried “but I don’t see a water line.”  “That’s because you’re looking down,” Stanhouse responded.  The water line was seven feet up.

Still woodsy, the surrounding forest was thinned seriously by the summer of storms.  The Magic Ranch lost 5 mango trees, 11 royal palms, 40 pines, and all the ferns, Stanhouse reports.

Now the studio has been rewired with the electrical work up high and plans for a pulley system so the new equipment can be raised to the roof in storms.

And she’s back in business.  The studio, a former stable, has five rooms — and a project laid out in each one.  Doors open out to the trees and breeze in every room.  The walls are freshly painted bright, clean white and the Buena Vista Social Club is blaring from a sound system.

Stanhouse and Steve Schuman examine a welding point.

A drawing table in the “drawing room,” complete with an oriental carpet,  is covered with sketches on brown paper for a large gate spanning a driveway with an overhead title frame (Casa Karma) worked in a Tibetan eternity knot motif with zen grasses and design elements.

Propped everywhere are pieces half finished or waiting for the next stage of work — the final assembly or the power coating or the finish detailing.

Leaning against the wall near the drawing table is the sample piece for the recently installed elevator doors in the new Freeman Justice Center in Key West. The aluminum doors were computer etched in a design begun by Terry Thommes and completed by Stanhouse after Thommes death.  Stanhouse augmented Thommes’ mangrove concept with finely drawn keys images: an osprey nest, palms, a conch, a grouper, a turtle, a barracuda, a frangipani blossom, a roseate spoonbill, dragonflies, seagrapes (with grapes), and banana leaves.

Large drawings in the final size, are ready for a fountain project laid out on a plywood and saw-horse table in the yard.

Around the studio, rusted and sometimes antique steel artifacts are nestled among big trees and viny plants on the two-acre lot.

More projects — the Louie’s Back Yard After Deck gate, some Ocean Reef designs — wait for attention among the compressors, bins full of who knows what, wheeled carts with laser cutters, motors, monster clamps and snips, gloves, welder’s helmets, industrial boots, painting materials, anvils, and shop vacs. Plus the ride-on mower, the pressure washer and the lawn mower.

Stanhouse surveys a fountain project ready for assembly with studio visitor Steve Schuman.

Stanhouse was finishing up a cat and a rooster for the Gato pocket park conch house display that was dedicated last week.  She is also doing an 8-foot cigar with an elaborate cigar band based on historic designs used in Key West cigar factories.

Like decorating a Christmas tree, Sculpture Key West ornaments the island of Key West each year with an incredible array of contemporary sculpture.

This year’s festival of 3D creativity begins with eight artists’ work at the Key West Garden Club Headquarters at West Martello Tower on Higgs Beach.

Cling wrap
From the road you can see a Jetson-style space formation stretched into the landscaping.  Up close you realize it is constructed of cellophane!  The Parisian artist, Ludwika Ogorzelec, has crafted an oversize string sculpture wrapped to the environment and weighted with garden rocks.

This is a new look at Saran Wrap (I’m not really sure that is the brand).  It bends light in fun ways and the cleverness of the design is a marvel.

Aunt Helen’s Doilies

Inside the brick fort, Weston, Florida, artist Liliana Crespi has spun crocheted spider webs in the trees.    The same traditional tablecloth patterns my Aunt Helen churned out by the trunkload in Crespi’s hands become a garden screen stretched amid the trees.  A Pineapple pattern wheel flies high, casting superb shadows.

“Flowers Don’t Grow Out of Nothing”
An Addison Walz organic installation features sprouting plants and newspaper papier mache “to expose the shortcomings of memory.”

Also on the grounds a New York artist used polyester felt to “create layered community collaboration and comments on mapping, mark making and memory.”
Sound figures in other “trumpet” pieces made from local plant materials. Video and clay and corrugated plastic express other sculptural concepts.

Porcelain Scavenger Hunt
Inside the garden club rooms, Julia Handschuh provides a porcelain scavenger hunt.  She released 100 light-as-air porcelain objects into nature at West Martello and at Fort Zachary Taylor and invites us to find them, sharing with her where they were recovered.

The Fort Zach portion of the exhibit opens March 1 with 25 installations around the beaches, Australian pine grove and the fort exterior.

In addition, 11 pieces are scattered throughout the city in pocket parks, ponds and municipal buildings.  The work will be on display until April 18.  Pick up a catalogue with easy-to-read maps and take off on your bike for a thought-provoking adventure.

The confident, skilled figures drawings and other recent works by Annamarie Giordano will be featured at Bone Island Appraisals for the Feb 19, 6 to 9 p.m. Walk on White. The works will hang through March 13. If you appreciate strong figure drawing, this is your ticket.

SoDu Gallery, of which I am proud to be a partner, presents the ocean-inspired “Groovy Pots” of Blue Ridge Mountain potter Jim Whalen, founder of Paradox Pottery.

Whalen has developed dramatic glazing techniques in both his Groovy series and his pit-fired vessels.

The Groovies distill the motion of the ocean into rolling waves of clay mounted on mollusk motif pedestals. The bubbling surface glaze he mastered for them appears ready to convert to sea spray in the first briny breeze.

His traditional pit-fired pieces are classically graceful vessels glazed in earth-tone patterns with a technical difficulty of 10.

Whalen controls the random flares and streaks of the raku process into patterns that are “sometimes mathematical, sometimes emotional, but always drawn from within.”  The mathematical designs result from grids of vertical and horizontal lines that define diamonds, hexagons, etc. “I can never get over how strange it is to put a straight line on a curved surface,” he says. The swirling, shadowy pit-fired pots carry names like “Dark Matter,” “Dreams of the Evolving Planet” and “Meterorite Shower.”

See the pit-fired work at www.paradoxpttery.com. See more of SoDu Gallery at www.1100sodugallery.com

The show at SoDu Gallery, 1100 Duval Street, opens with a reception 6 to 9 p.m. Wednesday February 4, and runs through mid-February. Call 296-4400 for more information.