Artists of COCO Gallery
Artists of COCO Gallery

Barbara Ellis
I’ve always loved creating art. As a child I was always drawing on anything at hand. Travel inspires me more than anything else. After retirement, my late husband and I spent nine years living in an RV, traveling all over the U.S. and Mexico. Now Florida’s beaches and tropical plants and birds are frequent subjects in my paintings.

Jean Green
I started painting as a hobby after retiring from teaching in the public schools, but it has blossomed into something that I am very passionate about. My preferred medium is working with oils.
While developing my skills as an artist, I am open to painting many different subjects. I enjoy perusing antique and consignment shops to find a variety of objects to render in a still life set up.
I love to travel and have been greatly influenced by the art of the places I have visited from the Caribbean, Europe, Asia and Africa. I am also influenced by many of the impressionist painters, with lots of loose brushstrokes. I now have a home in Estero, Florida and enjoy painting the beautiful wildlife and flora here.
My hope is that the viewer will have a sense of the passion that I put into my painting, and walk away with seeing the beauty of the subject in a unique way.

Maria Hart
My passion for creating and visualizing art pieces started when I was very young living in Cuba. In March 2020, I moved back to Florida from Houston, Texas where I showed my work in galleries and juried shows around the Houston area. Before moving to Houston, I earned my Bachelor of Arts in Motion Picture Technology at the University of Central Florida. I was very lucky to have the opportunity to work for Disney Animation Studios in Orlando Florida where I fell in love with animation and special effects, the experience and knowledge that I acquired plus my degree permitted me to teach Computer Visual Effects at Full Sail Real World Education School in Orlando, Florida.
At present, I am dedicating my time to experimenting with different styles and mediums (watercolor, oil, acrylic, wood, pastels, color pencils, paper) creating works from ideas and inspiration collected from the past and always incorporating my experience into futures works.

Frances Hawbaker
My paintings transform familiar local surroundings into emotionally expressed landscape or situation. Rather than documenting a specific place, I reconstruct it—reshaping color, scale, and atmosphere to reflect internal states as much as physical terrain. The landscapes are deliberately contrived; they are built from memory, distortion, and intuition rather than observation alone.
Through heightened color and gestural mark-making, I aim to amplify the emotional impact of ordinary environments. Hills bend, skies press outward, and space shifts with layers overlapping. Stillness,and an expressions of mood, are portrayed in the portraits of quiet and isolated moments in time.

Kristin Herzog
My work is the result of exploration. I am a process painter and enjoy using acrylics to get many different layers quickly. The fun comes with unexpected results, and I like that one has to puzzle the images out. Using a random application of gesso on a blank surface, causes interesting shapes and unexpected textures, creating a sense of history.

Susan Jenkins
As an artist and educator, my artwork is a mirror and map, charting the landscapes I inhabit. My paintings and mixed media creations weave together the textures of natural and constructed environments, where vibrant brushstrokes meet sgraffito, layered collage, and mixed media. Within these contrasts, I invite the viewer to move past the visible surface and enter a deeper terrain, one rich with memory, observation, and personal truths.






