Stephanie Delaney

By Tobin Bennison

How Indialantic resident Stephanie Delaney manages to raise four children on her own while creating art is a wonder in itself. That she’s created such a huge, widely-ranged body of work is nothing short of a miracle.

Stephanie’s father was in the Air Force and the family moved frequently. “We lived in Hawaii and Japan -- all over,” she remembers. “Until we settled in Florida in 1980, I don’t think we lived in any one place for more than a year at a time.” After graduating from the Art Institute of Ft. Lauderdale, she began a family and taught art classes at several private schools to supplement her income. All the while, she continued to paint and create sporadically, devoting the majority of her time to raising her children: two boys (now 19 and 23) and two girls (11 and 18).

Many artists might express regret at having to put their passion on the backburner for familial responsibilities, but not Stephanie. “Looking back, I don’t regret a thing,” she says. “As much as I love my art, there was never any question that spending quality time with my children was more important.”

Stephanie’s company, Paintmom Design and its website Paintmom.com, was conceived over periods of “downtime” while she raising her kids. Stephanie describes these early years as “a time of watching and learning, and seeing the ordinary through the extraordinary eyes and insights” of her children’s innocence. “Much of what they taught me, I tried to hold in my heart and retain until the time was right to pick up my brushes once again.” With her kids’ toddler years well in the past, that time has come.

Along with participating in many of the local arts and crafts shows, Stephanie is able to devote a bit more time to adding to her already large collection of award-winning creations. Though she enjoys painting the most, it’s often easier to concentrate on her many mosaic sculptures. “Sometimes with all the activity in the house, it’s hard to concentrate on painting. Mosaics are a kind of fun project that you can ignore for a while and come back to,” she explains. One piece in particular caught the eye of her youngest daughter’s friend. “She told me she loved it, and when I explained to her that it wasn’t finished, she couldn’t believe it,” remembers Stephanie. “’I like it just the way it is,’ she said, and sometimes I think she’s right.”

This receptiveness to youthful perspective keeps Stephanie open to all manner of inspiration, from the ubiquitous shoreline and crashing waves, to animals, woodland landscapes, visual vignettes of daily life, and tropical foliage. Another driving force in her artwork is what she calls is “Interactive Art,” in which the viewer is invited to touch, see, and even hear the art, best represented by a painted surfboard featuring a mosaic mermaid. Crafted from shells and sea glass, her face reveals a mirror which draws the viewer in and invites one to “become” the mermaid.

As her children have grown and changed, Stephanie’s become more aware of the state of our planet and the responsibility she feels as an artist to spread respect for our precious natural resources. “I want to leave our children a positive and healthy legacy, and I think that I can do that best through my art,” she reflects.

In keeping with this philosophy, Stephanie’s passion for creating works that depict nature and living things has evolved into what she calls “Eco-friendly Salvage Art.” This involves combining any variety of used, discarded and/or found objects with paint, mosaics made with cut china, glass, shells, or stones) and other found items to create unique pieces that please the senses while reducing the impact on our overflowing landfills. “If you came to my house and looked in my garage, you might just see a huge pile of salvaged junk,” she says. “But to me, everything in there -- from shards of broken dishes to bits and pieces of what others decided was trash -- all of it will be some part of a piece in the future.”

Stephanie is also a skilled muralist, and many of her best designs incorporate the unique flora and fauna of Florida. Other subjects include fanciful characters and a dream-like fairy tale castle for a young girl’s bedroom. An evocative wispy beach scene adorns the living room wall of a private Sebastian home and a characteristic gulfside shack greets patrons at the Boston Cooker restaurant in Oldsmar.

What’s wonderful about Stephanie’s art is the seeming facility with which she moves from genre to genre and style to style. At home in a wide variety of mediums, she can turn her hand at a realistic manatee, an early morning surf fisherman, or a stylized, almost primitivistic pastel pompano. A photographic distillation of animal life captures a personal, nearly human-like disposition, and these talents have been put to good use by the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill.

Well before her brother, who suffered from schizophrenia, committed suicide a few years past, Stephanie and her parents have been active with the mental health charity. For each year’s fundraiser, lucky winners of a popular drawing can have their favorite pet’s portrait painted by her. A look at some of these works on her website reveals the individual approach she employs for each unique subject, and many are commissioned pieces from adoring owners. Again, an uncanny grasp of each animal’s personality shines through by the technique she adopts: some realistic oils marked by deep shadows and caught-in-the-moment postures, others by bright washes of thickly-daubed color.

You can’t help but wonder how Stephanie manages to juggle all these responsibilities and activities. “Although the process of pulling, pushing and coaxing a work from an idea or inspiration is often frustrating,” she muses, “and though I have been known to run down the road pulling at my hair and screeching like a deranged maniac, I find that persistence -- o.k., stubbornness -- and faith help pull me through.” As she herself says: “The end result is truly worth every effort, every doubt and every bad hair day.”

See Stephanie’s work at: www.paintmom.com or call (321) 729-6655 for custom, comissioned work requests and other information. Her website provides a rundown of her philosophy, photos, and a link to works on display at another on-line gallery.