Frank Sadera's landscapes: as good as the real thing
His work will be on display beginning Dec. 8
BY EVAN WILLIAMS ewilliams@florida-weekly.com

SPECIAL TO FLORIDA WEEKLY Frank Sader's landscapes will be on display at the Florida Fine Art Gallery in Gannon's Antiques & Art Center beginning Dec. 8.

Frank Sadera's landscapes are extremely pleasing for how they depict nature as mysterious and infinite. His humans have a small place in that, doing their own thing off to the side of the road or frolicking in the sea under a gorgeous, swirling Florida sky, a road disappearing into the sunset beyond them.

His sensitivity to nature's devastating beauty and loneliness echo Van Gogh, but his style is smoother, more realistic. And that's why looking at a Sedara painting can produce that great, visceral feeling that if you took a very careful step in the proper frame of mind, you could actually walk into it. It is a measure of his success with style that driving over the Sanibel Causeway and seeing the water, the sky and the air, causes feelings similar to looking at one of his paintings.

That success did not come easily. At the age of 32, Sadera "dropped out," and took his family to a farm in Kentucky, where he spent three years learning how to paint.

"I did whatever I could to be able to raise a family, to buy paint, to buy canvas," he said. "I've taken every kind of job imaginable to keep going as a painter, but now I'm painting full time and it's a delight. I have no regrets. It's a wonderful way to spend my time."

At one point, Sadera was working second shift in a factory, as he raised three children, a condition which went on for about nine years. His children are all grown now, two living in Massachusetts, one the vice president of a hospital in Miami; he also has four grandchildren.

"You do what you have to do," he said. "Anybody that wants to do art, get ready. You've gotta have the hide of an alligator sometimes. Even if you can keep the soft heart, you've gotta have some defenses."

Sadera is a big guy, quietly intense, a presence without being intrusive, and his blue eyes and freckles and the long planes of his face tempt comparison with his work; it seems to makes sense that this person did those paintings. But where does the art really come from?

One answer might be Sadera's wife, Brenda.

"She has been a very big backer of my work, and also my severest critic," he said. "But her understanding and support allows me to continue painting."

Another answer might be painters like Winslow Homer or Richard Schmidt or the old masters that Sadera said he loves, like Rembrandt and Velasquez. But at Sadera's age, those loves have become more distant - either that or an inseparable part of the man himself.

"You've gotta kind of forget what you've learned, if you want to find your own style," he said. "It's a struggle to find what you are about, your own statement, and that evolves over a long period of time."

Ultimately art, like nature, is a mystery.

"Why do I select the things I do to paint?" Sadera asked "I have no idea… Each new one I feel like is going to be the best one I've done, and sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn't."

Some other things about Frank Sadera, if you're looking for clues: he likes classical music and also jazz artists like Oscar Peterson and Aaron Copland. Sadera and his wife are going to a Willie Nelson concert soon, he said. His most recent read, which he recommends, is a book called "Marley and Me," about a guy's dog. He also recently read a biography of Einstein, which enthralled him. His favorite time of day is 3 a.m.

"The cat literally jumps off the headboard and hits me and I'm stunned," he said. "I can't go back to sleep and I start thinking about painting…So many solutions are just out of reach sometimes, and the next day, the whole world seems to have changed and the things I worried about have resolved themselves. But I think everybody feels that way."

And he's worried about the environment, but the reason for that is very simple.

"There's so much beauty in what we're losing," he said.

One last thing Sadera wants to add: "I try to just live my life one day at a time."