- December 4, 2025
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One of Deena King's credos is that art is a wild and beautiful journey.
That journey has taken her out of downtown Sarasota to the Lakewood Ranch area, where she is now settled into a somewhat minimalist studio just south of Kingfisher Lake and Waterside Place.
Such a short journey, only about 10 miles, would seem to be a negligible trip, no big deal for an expressionist painter who spends much of her time working with "my head in the clouds."
But the change for King in 2025 is both significant for herself, and for her new place of business.
Lakewood Ranch, for all its efforts to become arts friendly, has struggled over its 30 years of existence in its efforts to add the arts to its lifestyle component. Plans for theaters have fallen through, and galleries have come and gone.
The arts culture now is delivered in pop-up style, with shows lining Lakewood Main Street for a couple of days at a time, then disappearing for six months or more. Schroeder-Manatee Ranch, Lakewood Ranch's developer and parent, has added bursts of creativity with its Sights and Sounds series that runs once a month, and sometimes twice, at the Waterside Place pavilion.
Against that landscape, King has decided to make a go of it in the Lakewood Ranch area, which she says is ripe for a gallery. If her efforts at 8326 Consumer Court just south of Waterside Place, where she rents a space for her Define Arts Gallery, are successful, she said she will look for a more bustling street in Lakewood Ranch to move her gallery, which would rival the one she had at 68 S. Palm Ave., Sarasota.
"I learned a lot at Palm Avenue," said King, who lives with her husband Casey King at Tatum Ridge, just off Fruitville Road and close to her new studio. "At Palm, I would get a lot of buyers from Lakewood Ranch, but they didn't like to drive through the traffic.
"These are new buyers, who are not seasonal or tourists. They are full-time buyers and they are younger. There is this stigma that Sarasota is where people come to retire. You get an older buyer, and they are looking for traditional art. The younger buyers, and I am talking in their 40s and 50s, they view art differently. It doesn't need to match the sofa and drapes. They want it to match their personality. So let's see what Lakewood Ranch has to offer. It is booming."
While King, who was a graphic designer for 20 years before spending the last 10 years in the fine arts community, said it can be nice when art does match the sofa and drapes, her art is about personality.
"It's intuitive," she said. "It's whatever is feeling right at the moment. It just feels right to me.
"There is this strange connection between me and the canvas."
She looked up at one of her acrylic paintings on the wall of her new studio. It had a series of circles in no particular order. In this work, the circles are not bold in color, almost as if they are peeking out of the canvas.
"I believe less is more," she said. "I just start creating. It's a lot of circles, but they aren't apparent. It just feels right."
Her new studio itself resembles a big garage with a high ceiling. It is a neutral environment with electrical conduits running across the walls, a double-car garage door, and insulation in full view from the ceiling. She displays approximately 20 paintings on the walls all around or on easels. At this time, she only hosts potential buyers by appointment, but in a few months she will host somewhat of an official opening with perhaps a type of pop-up event once a week.
She likes the environment as she said buyers aren't distracted from her work by the surroundings.
Of her work, she said, "I'm an abstract expressionist artist drawn to the layers, emotions, and messy beauty of the human experience."
The messy beauty was not on display this day, as to prepare for an interview, her work table was covered with a very clean sheet of plastic. She smiled when explaining it is not normally in such a state. It is obvious she kind of likes the messy side of her profession.
It would be ineffective to describe her work as a whole because it differs so much, depending on her mood or emotional state. One work would be a burst of color with her trademark love of blue, but another would be dark and distant. Many of her works contain a written explanation on the back, telling of a poem or thought that prompted her to go a certain direction.
A graduate with a degree in fine arts in graphic design from Fort Hays State, in her native Kansas, her early love of art was inspired by her grandmothers, who "were constantly quilting and crocheting."
"I thought it was neat that they made something with their hands," King said.
Her direction toward expressionism took a turn at Hays High School because of encouragement from her art teacher, Mick Jing. Since her education set her up for a career in graphic design, she followed that path for 20 years before launching her fine arts career.
Being an expressionist means dealing with ebbs and flows, both of emotions and in business. Those who come to her studio can have extreme reactions to each individual piece.
"You need to have a tough skin," she said. "It's the world of art."
It's the same in business as well, as some months can see significant sales, while others light linger in a financial desert.
Her stability is provided by her husband. Casey, the director of IT for Molex, a Chicago company which specializes in technological expertise for healthcare, aerospace, and other industries.
Together, they move forward in the Lakewood Ranch area.
"(The new studio) is a good stepping stone," Deena King said. "This is kind of like what I did on upper Main Street in Sarasota. This is definitely a destination point, and I love that boutique-style gallery. I am going to see what my reception is like here in Lakewood Ranch. If this works out, I might have a storefront again."
