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By PENNY FLETCHER
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This Hopi Indian showed up in full dress for a ceremony which Anne and Wayne say they felt privileged to watch.
Behind his rustic Ruskin home packed with Native American and old West artifacts is a small studio where Wayne keeps his prize possessions: his camera equipment and art supplies.
Near his easel are paintings reminiscent of days gone by and of Tampa’s new high-rise skyline.
Sometimes, he says, he shoots photographs and then later paints from the pictures.
Showing me a photograph he recently shot of Tampa’s high rises, he told me he’d taken it through the car window while his wife was driving about 60 mph. “Shot it right through the glass,” he exclaimed, showing off his latest digital Nikon. “This is a real beauty,” he added.
Going through the paintings I could see things I remembered having seen in life years ago: an old pump Esso station; a car with running boards. And modern shots of trees, flowers, buildings, orange groves and tomato fields. But the photographs he has taken of Florida aren’t all he has in his collection.
“I love to travel,” he told me as he flipped from one file to another on his computer. There I saw sunsets over tropical islands, deserts, mountains, woods, and waterfalls, and flowers and animals of all kinds.
One shot of a bird in flight reflected so beautifully on the water you could have inverted the photograph and never known which side was real and which was the reflection.
Wayne’s specialty, however, seems to be Native American cultures. There were photographs of Seminoles dancing, Hopi decked out for tribal ceremonies and Cherokee in native dress. Other frames featured Apache smoke dances and Zunis in the New Mexico desert.
He’s been the historian for the Florida Agricultural Hall of Fame at the Florida Fairgrounds for many years, and because of that, the University of Florida gave him a grant to put a book together about the state together with his son Sean, who after obtaining a degree from the Ringling School of Art opened a graphics company in Sarasota. Wayne worked on the content and Sean designed the pages in four months time.
“We did it for the Hall of Fame during its celebration of the first 100 people inducted during its first 25 years in operation,” he said, pointing out some of the people featured along the top of the pages which were mostly covered in brilliantly-colored art.
I didn’t expect a man who spent much of his life turning companies from failures to profitable organizations for banks to have such artistic ability. His business acumen had to be sharp because banks could only own a company for a short time, so they either had to be made profitable or dismantled.
“I started in the gas business but pretty soon I was in charge of the Northeastern United States and then I quit and went into the thing with the banks. I took poorly-run companies and made them lucrative enterprises. Some were losing more than a million dollars a year. I did 17 of them and never had one fail,” he told me proudly.
Going from one business to another- whether building materials or newspapers- he learned a lot about different businesses in a hurry.
“The most interesting thing I remember doing was taking a 160-year-old weekly newspaper that was down to 6 pages to a 40-page weekly in just a couple of years,” he told me.
“We had to turn around quick and get out. It was banking rules, you know.”
Five years was the absolute limit for the bank to own a company, he explained.
After that, he built industrial buildings.
He moved to Florida after doing a job at Borden Chemical Plant at Piney Point. “That’s where I met Annie (Richardson). My first wife had died.”
Wayne and Anne Harris of Ruskin have a full life traveling the country, especially Western Indian reservations, where Wayne takes professional photographs and then later turns his photography into painting. A recent pictorial book he and his son, Sean, a graphic artist living in Sarasota, recently produced, titled Florida’s Agricultural Heritage, was bought by the State of Florida so that a copy could be included in every junior and senior high school and library in the state. (Penny Fletcher photo)
I wanted to know how he had integrated art into his business-like life.
“When I was a teenager, trucks had to have their gross empty and full weights painted on their sides,” he told me. “So I painted them. I used to do some oils then too, but then I went to work and didn’t paint for years.”
About three years ago he bought some supplies and sat back down at his easel.
And something tells me he isn’t finished yet.
*Perhaps you have something you’d like to share. Or maybe you’d rather tell the community about your favorite charity or cause: or sound off about something you think needs change. That’s what “Over Coffee” is about. It really doesn’t matter whether we actually drink any coffee or not (although I probably will). It’s what you have to say that’s important. E-mail me at
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and suggest a meeting place. No matter what’s going on, I’m usually available to share just one more cup.
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