
These five watercolors, as well as a number of others not shown here, represent a small part of the considerable body of new work that Jack Pierson created from December 2014 through February 2015, while undertaking a private, solo retreat on North Captiva Island, Florida, part of the Lee Island barrier chain, created suddenly and violently when the Tampa Bay Hurricane of 1921 severed the 700 acres that are now North Captiva from the more populous and commercial Captiva Island to the south.
It’s a remote spot, North Captiva, and it’s hard to access. Almost two-thirds of this mangrove=bordered island, for instance, consists of an undeveloped, state-owned wilderness preserve that sustains the natural habitats of over 100 species of migratory birds, manatees, dolphins, Loggerhead sea turtles, Eastern coral snakes, Dusky Pygmy rattlers, hawks, osprey, and, according to some sightings, two adult Floridaand. The only way to reach the southern tip of the island, where Pierson installed himself and his materials in one of the only ten, mostly solar-powered houses, is by private boat. When I visited Pierson there in late January—he picked me up at an old marina on Captive Island, in an outboard he was piloting—the winds became so high and the Gulf of Mexico so turbulent and choppy that we became stuck on North Captiva for four days straight, during which time we were the only occupants of the beach houses, each of which was surrounded on three sides by dead Australian pines, tall and slender and bare, with furrowed barks that have turned over time from grey to a bleached, ghostly white. These pines, unlike many others, were those that had not been split or knocked over when Hurricane Charley bore down on North Captiva almost a dozen years before. Often, ospreys built their large stick-and-sod nests at the tops.

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