Ocean Blue Galleries - Galleries & The Beach
Open Till Eleven - Ocean Blue Galleries and the Beach Drive Art Trade
On St. Petersburg's glossiest boulevard, an Australian hotelier-turned-gallerist and a former Ohio State right tackle run a gallery tuned to the rhythms of the waterfront — where the art stays lit as long as the restaurants do.
Beach Drive works differently than the rest of St. Petersburg's art map. The Central Arts District runs on studio hours and Second Saturdays; the Warehouse Arts District runs on kilns and open flames. Beach Drive runs on evenings — museum visitors spilling out of the MFA, diners drifting between white-tablecloth restaurants, hotel guests taking the waterfront air. Ocean Blue Galleries, at 284 Beach Drive NE, is built precisely for that current. Its hours tell the story before the art does: open until 10 p.m. most nights, 11 on weekends — schedule-matched not to the gallery world but to the boulevard outside its windows.
The gallery is the joint venture of two art-trade veterans with unusually different origin stories. Guy Vincent was born in Sydney, Australia, spent five years working in the country's top hotel, then lived in Portugal and Switzerland before landing in Florida — where he has spent more than two decades running art galleries in Key West and Sarasota. Jay Shaffer is an Ohioan and an Ohio State alumnus who played right tackle for the Buckeyes from 1983 to 1987, ran businesses in Ohio, and moved to Florida nearly twenty years ago to manage one of the country's most successful art gallery chains. Between them, by their own accounting, the pair brings some 55 years in the business — and a shared conviction that St. Petersburg was ready for the model they had refined in Florida's tourist capitals.
The Three-City Model
Ocean Blue is not a single gallery but a small Florida chain, with sister locations on Winter Park's Park Avenue and in Key West — three addresses that share a common denominator: affluent, high-foot-traffic districts where visitors arrive in a spending mood. The St. Petersburg gallery anchors the trio's Gulf Coast presence, occupying prime frontage on Beach Drive within a block of the Museum of Fine Arts and steps from the city's waterfront parks.
The programming model is equally distinct from the city's nonprofit and co-op galleries. Ocean Blue deals in what the trade calls collectible artists — nationally and internationally marketed names with established secondary markets, editioned works, and dedicated collector bases. The gallery describes its roster as top-selling and most-collectible artists from around the country and overseas, and its approach to selling reflects the retail sophistication of its founders' backgrounds: consultations aimed at understanding a collector's taste, financing and ownership options that lower the barrier to a first serious purchase, and a stated ambition to treat buyers as extended family rather than transactions.
What's on the Walls
Three names give the flavor of the collection. The gallery holds what it bills as the largest selection anywhere of sculptures by Nano Lopez, the Colombian-born artist whose whimsical bronzes — animals and figures encrusted with organic textures and found human-made objects — have become fixtures of the collectible-sculpture market, ranging from palm-sized "nanos" to major statement pieces.
Then there is the gallery's most surprising dealer relationship: Dr. Seuss. Ocean Blue carries works from The Art of Dr. Seuss collection, the authorized program presenting Theodor Seuss Geisel's lesser-known artistic life — his editorial cartooning of the 1920s, his sculpture, and the elaborate "secret art" oil paintings he made for himself across decades of nights and weekends. For visitors who know Geisel only through green eggs, the exhibit is reliably the room that stops them.
The roster keeps moving: the gallery recently welcomed Walfrido Garcia, the Hawaiian luminist known for radiant, high-color seascapes, to its represented artists. And in the Beach Drive tradition, Ocean Blue leans on events — artist meet-and-greets with complimentary refreshments where collectors can watch represented painters work live in the gallery, a programming rhythm closer to a hospitality business than a white cube. Given that one founder ran Australia's top hotel and the other managed a national gallery chain, that is less coincidence than design.
The Other Half of the Ecosystem
It is worth being clear-eyed about where Ocean Blue sits in St. Petersburg's art ecology, because the distinction is useful to visitors. This is a commercial gallery in the resort-town tradition — closer kin to the galleries of Key West's Duval Street or Las Vegas's casino corridors than to the artist-run co-ops of Central Avenue. Its artists are national brands rather than local makers; its mission is retail, not development; and its critics and its customers would describe it in exactly the same terms and disagree only on whether that's a compliment.
But a complete arts city needs this tier too. Beach Drive's galleries capture an audience — museum tourists, conventioneers, waterfront condo buyers furnishing new walls — that the studio districts rarely reach, and they keep art in the shop windows of the city's most-walked luxury blocks. Every visitor who buys a first piece at a Beach Drive gallery is a potential future collector for the local artists a mile west. In a city marketing itself as an arts destination, the fact that original art is for sale at 10:45 on a Saturday night, in a lit gallery between the restaurants, is its own kind of infrastructure.
Ocean Blue Galleries makes no apologies for what it is: a polished, energetic, unabashedly commercial gallery run by two men who have spent their careers learning what makes people fall in love with a piece of art on vacation — and take it home.
Visit: Ocean Blue Galleries, 284 Beach Dr. NE, St. Petersburg. Open Sunday–Thursday 10 a.m.–10 p.m., Friday–Saturday 10 a.m.–11 p.m. Sister galleries in Winter Park and Key West. Information: OceanBlue.gallery or (727) 502-2583.
Sources: Ocean Blue Galleries; St. Petersburg Chamber of Commerce; VISIT FLORIDA; Winter Park Chamber of Commerce.
