August Powers

August Powers is nearly one of those rare Florida finds: a native. He’s been here since 1958 and grew up swimming, sailing, snorkeling and boating the waters of South Florida back when it was still rural wilderness.

It was that rural wilderness that inspired his creativity and placed him on the path to being a professional artist. Today he enjoys a laidback Keys lifestyle generated by a craft he takes pleasure in—on his terms.

Instrumental Sea Life

AAA Going Places caught up with August in July on a dive boat bound for the 2008 Underwater Music Festival. He had created the festival’s signature art piece, the Clam-bourine. His past creations mixing music and sea life for other Underwater Music fests include the Trom-Bonefish, the Manta Mandolin and the Fiddle Crab ‘n Bowfish, to name a few. As others on the boat clambered around him with masks, fins and tanks, this interesting and incredibly creative man sat quietly, clearly enjoying the moment as his creations were lovingly chosen and handed out to participants who were to showcase them on the reef below.

August Powers' Grouper

And it begged the question: how is it that this quiet, unassuming man arrives at a creation as innovative as a Clam-bourine or a Sax-Eel-Phone?

Natural Muse

“I’ve always been inspired by nature,” August says. “My mother moved us down here after a two-week Florida vacation. She loved being as near as possible to the ocean…surrounded by nature, and that did inform my life very strongly. We never had a lot of money, but we never needed much in order to have a rich life. It was all around us for the taking.

“As a child, I was always making things. If I had the money, I bought and made wood models of airplanes and boats. When I couldn’t afford to buy a model, I simply figured out how to make the pieces and build my own.”

Later, August worked as a cook for a local marine camp for children, where he began carving food into edible centerpieces for its special events.

“My life continued to be closely tied to the water and using my hands to be creative. I didn’t think of myself as an artist—not yet—even though I eventually figured out that if I could carve a carrot into a totem, I could carve a log!  It’s funny how something so obvious—that there was an artist inside me struggling to come out—can get overlooked."

Adventures in Metal

“Then in 1994, my mother signed me up for a welding class at the local community college as a birthday present. As with almost all of my mother’s gifts, this one came with instructions. My mother had decided she wanted a copper fountain, and she had decided that I was going to make it. That was my mission, and after that I could do what I wanted.

August Powers' Barracuda

“I quickly fell in love with copper as a medium, and became fascinated with figuring out how I could push what is essentially a nonfluid medium—metal—to capture the fluidity of the fish and other sea life I had spent much of my life swimming and diving among. It was the perfect synthesis of everything for me; it combined ‘building stuff’ with my love of nature and the creatures that inhabited the water.”

Success Happens

It wasn’t long before August’s hobby began to get noticed.

“My pieces began to sell here and there to friends and friends-of-friends,” he reminisces. “Then a co-op gallery, the Artists in Paradise Gallery, opened here on Big Pine Key and I was able to join it and more pieces sold. Soon after, I was approached by the Wild Side Gallery down in Key West, and suddenly there were so many pieces selling I realized I needed to quit my day job in order to keep up."

August Powers' Fiddle Crab.

It was then he realized he’d become an artist.

“Every so often I still have to pinch myself, to be sure I’m awake and that this is really where my life has taken me. I think where I live contributes to it; people who live here seem to love to surround themselves with art that echoes the natural world that has drawn them down here to settle in the Keys. And people who visit seem to love to take a bit of the keys with them. I find that many different sorts of people respond to my work—people who love sculpture, people who love sea life, guys who would never think of buying a piece of art but love to fish and want one of my groupers or barracudas."

But August hasn’t sold out to the market. His art is done on his terms and no one else’s.
“I only make what I love and what I feel compelled to make,” he explains. “That is why I do very few commissions. People sometimes ask if I will make a particular fish or other creature, and if I am not personally interested in making it I will say no.

“I do not use water jets or plasma cutters to bulk cut any of my pieces, nor do I use any sort of mold in any of my work. Each piece is really unique. Yes, I could make more pieces faster that way (using mass production technology), but that’s not who I am.

“Every piece I make is a part of me, made entirely by me, designed by me and is something that expresses what I love in life.

“The fact that other people want to buy my work and allow me to keep doing what I do is a blessing I am grateful for every day.”