I have a special connection to turtles in general and to the Green Sea Turtle in particular. In my early 20s I worked in Tortuguero, Costa Rica at the Caribbean Conservation Corporation tagging Green Sea Turtles. We'd tag them with a metal tag clipped on to their flipper. Since the turtles would only come on to the beach to nest at night, most of us at the research station adopted a nocturnal rythm. We'd walk the beach for most of the night tagging the sea turtles and counting the eggs in their nest, trying to bother them as little as possible. It was an incredible experience and I got to interact with many sea turtles. We even had one get eaten by a panther in the dark which definitely made us think about walking the beach a bit differently after that!
But long before wrestling sea turtles on the beach in Costa Rica my nickname was "The Turtleman" when I was just a kid growing up in Riverside, Rhode Island. There was a pond near my house that all of us kids would walk to with our nets & buckets, Willett Pond. We'd fish and catch turtles all day long. There were no parents hovering over us. A biker gang who would hang out in the parking lot of the pond was our closest thing to adult supervision! Those summers seemed to last forever.
Cara Conaty was part of the group of us kids that roamed free and hung out catching turtles. We had all of our classes together from the time we were in Kindergarten. She came to my first art show at Fleet National Bank in Riverside around that same time too. We've kept in touch ever since.
So I was pretty tickled when Cara called me about a year ago and asked if I could paint her a painting of a turtle! She is now a lawyer and has a house in Belize where she has gotten to swim with and develop a connection with Green Sea Turtles too. I was happy to paint her another sea turtle as she already had one of my previous sea turtle paintings in her collection. This piece was so fun to paint, hope you can see that in these images.
You can check out the prints by clicking here.
Please reach out via email if you'd like to discuss your own commissioned painting!
