Beauty and Vulnerability

Artist Mark Messersmith has won many awards and fellowships throughout his art career. His works mostly deal with many issues related to Florida’s wildlife. He is a professor of painting at Florida State University. In Messersmith’s vision virile beasts engage in struggles to the death, majestic birds feast amidst murky swamps, gators writhe between cypress roots, and all the while the threat of human encroachment looms darkly. The already precarious balances of these unstable environments begin to unfold.