“One to watch”

“Island Girl,” an airbrushed acrylic on canvas by artist Jeffrey Selker, is shown at his studio in Ocala, Fla. on Thursday, August 29, 2024. [Bruce Ackerman/Ocala Gazette] 2024.

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Posted September 3, 2024 | By Susan Smiley-Height, susan@magnoliamediaco.com

Even at an early age, Jeffrey Selker was drawing and painting. At 16, he had a part-time job airbrushing vehicles after school, to the tune of about $500 a week, which was a lot of money in the 1970s. Over the years, the now 64-year-old artist has produced a wide range of art in several mediums, including trompe-l’oeil, gouache, digital imagery, lithography and more.

The works range from 8-foot to 12-foot-long diptych and triptych oils to goache on paper paintings a few inches in diameter. His canvasses include vehicles such as vans, cars, motorcycles and helmets. His works have been exhibited in Florida museums and galleries in Miami Beach, Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton, Palm Beach, Ocala, Brooksville and Dunnellon, as well as New York, Cleveland and London.

On Friday evening, Sept. 6, Selker will display his colorful “Island Girl” airbrushed acrylic on canvas and another piece during the Marion Cultural Alliance’s opening reception for its new “Color Pop! Exhibit,” which will be on display through Sept. 28.

Selker previously participated in the “Art of Aging” exhibit at MCA, the “Battle of the Brushes” fundraiser in support of the alliance and the Magnolia Art Xchange (MAX) and has exhibited at Rainbow Springs Art in Dunnellon.

As for what might be next, Selker said, “I’m in the process of rediscovering myself as an artist.

“I came up here not expecting to find any art community at all; just a backyard where I’d set up an easel and do small paintings; kind of like retirement without being retired, and, if I was lucky, there would be a local craft show that maybe I could afford a booth and sell a couple of paintings. I wanted to paint for fun. And I moved right near the Appleton Museum, and I found the Webber Gallery and the NOMA Gallery, MCA, the Rainbow Springs gallery, a show in Brooksville at their city hall,” he said. “I know everybody at FAFO, but I don’t have a body of work right now as everything over 2 feet was in storage since we sold our house. So, in the next year, I’ll be working on a new body of work, but I have no idea what I’m going to do.”

The beginning

Selker was born in 1960 in North Miami. Six months later, his family moved to Miami Beach, or South Beach (SoBe), where he lived until he and his wife, Dawn, and son, Tyler, moved to Ocala in 2022.

As a youngster in South Beach, he said he was “a good kid for the most part, a bit mischievous in school. I did well in the classes I liked and found ways to get out of the ones that bored me and replace them with art or music classes.”

He said he was a bit of a daredevil and enjoyed being at the beach, skateboarding, snorkeling and surfing, which may be where the self-professed “gearhead” got his early and lifelong affinity for vans.

He said he was always interested in not just art, but in being a “maker.”

“As a kid, my toys were always about making things, be it Lego’s, Lincoln Logs, Spiral Graph, building models, even Hot Wheels, making the track layouts, but what I remember my mom telling me was that I was the easiest of her three kids to raise because all she would have to do to entertain me was to sit me down with paper and crayons, pencils, whatever, and I would sit and draw for hours. My best friend/next door neighbor, I think we were 4 at the time, was the same way, whether at my house or his, we would sit at a table, listen to cartoons on the TV and draw away for hours,” he shared.

“In 1975, I was 15 and my dad was driving me after school to a van shop to work and then a year later I was airbrushing vans making maybe $500 a week working part time. I thought I was set for life, but I didn’t know what a trend was. When vans started to be unpopular and it was motorcycles and pickups, I just switched. Then I got my studio on Lincoln Road, and I started entering museum shows and was very fortunate,” he added.

Selker said in the 1950’s, “Lincoln Road was the Rodeo Drive of South Beach. That’s where all the finest boutiques and clothing stores were and in the ’70s, when Miami Beach had the reputation of where all the old people went to retire, they went out of business and these beautiful storefronts became vacant. Bums started sleeping in these wonderful marble entrance ways. Ellie Schneiderman had the foresight and started to rent these buildings. I was in an old art deco Burdines that was incredible.”

Schneiderman’s obituary in the “Miami Herald” noted that, “Lincoln Road Mall in the 1950s was a street where you ‘dressed up to shop.’ Its decline into the 1980s took it from ‘haute couture to ‘Secondhand Rose.’ That is, until 1983 when Eleanor Schneiderman got hold of $62,000 in federal money and convinced the Miami Beach Commission to trust her to convert three blocks of deserted storefronts into what would become the South Florida Arts Center—later renamed ArtCenter/South Florida.”

“We had 85 artists in three buildings,” Selker recalled. “Then the ballet, theatre and symphony groups all moved in; restaurants, Starbucks, and the price of property went way up. All the tourists would come there. All I had to do was open my studio doors and people would walk in and buy artwork. It became the place.”

 

Artist at work

Selker said he works in “a lot of mediums, but the most obvious would be acrylic. The funny thing is, if most people who know me were asked that question, they would answer ‘airbrush.’ I do a lot of work in oil and gouache. I am a muralist and very well known for my work on show cars, motorcycles and vans. I have done a few murals in buildings and homes, as well as trompe-l’oeil work. I’m a digital creator as well, as I work in pixel, vector and CAD programs to design art and 3D images. I use these tools to create/compose imagery for my paintings, design content for catalogs and websites, and design items to 3D print for various projects.”

A local mural project Selker has underway is a pro street van owned by Danny Mercantini. The 1985 Astro van’s exterior offers a highly detailed scene of a graveyard.

“He made a dream come true. I had this mural in my head since I was 15. I got the idea from a movie, ‘Phantasm,’ and ever since then I had this idea of what you see there,” said Mercantini, pointing to the van body mounted on a car lift in his shop. “And he gave me way more than what I had up here,” he added, pointing to his head.

Selker also is a collector of scale models and fine art.

“I have well over 1,000 unbuilt models and belong to several model building clubs. I probably have a couple hundred works of art: Paintings, sculptures and prints. Most of my art is local and regional pieces; a lot of artists I have met and want to help support. Other hobbies I have either given up on or have put on the back burner are playing guitar, collecting and keeping saltwater fish, gardening and martial arts.”

 

Coming to Ocala

Selker said he and Dawn met at 15 and have been together ever since. Among the reasons the family moved to Ocala is that they have friends in the region and the traffic situation in the Miami area and continuing violence in their neighborhood got to be too much.

“We, as a family, my son Tyler, wife Dawn and myself, made a choice to finally get the heck out of South Florida. Moving to Central Florida has been in our eventual plans for Dawn and I for about 30 years, but the (COVID-19) pandemic put things in motion,” he explained.

Dawn is an accountant and Tyler works for a website development company. Along with Jeffrey, they quickly learned during the pandemic that they could work remotely from anywhere. Tyler checked out Ocala and the three of them soon headed north.

“He spent a week up here and he fell in love with it, so we found a house and bought it. We moved in November of 2022,” Selker noted.

Motioning around his large and jam-packed studio, Selker said of his next steps, “We’ll see what comes out. I refuse to paint with my hands tied behind my back. I want to paint however I want, whenever I want, on whatever I want. I will be doing a lot printmaking, and I want to learn to throw on a potter’s wheel. And I plan on teaching here, too. Everybody wants to know how to airbrush. There are several local artists dying for lessons.”

Leslie Hammond, ASA, founder and president of Artistic Eye Fine Art Services, who possesses decades of experience as an art historian, archaeologist and museum professional, including at the Appleton Museum of Art, recently said of Selker that while he is new to the Marion County art scene, he is “one to watch.”

To learn more about Selker’s art, find him on Instagram at selkerstudios

The opening reception for the “Color Pop! Exhibit is open to the public from 6 to 7 p.m. Sept. 6 at the Brick City Center for the Arts at 23 S Broadway St., Ocala. The exhibit will be on display through Sept. 28. For details, go to mcaocala.org