Artist Spotlight: Painter Myra Roberts

A blond bombshell in a 1950s waitress uniform and roller skates holds a tray of fish and mojitos as she rides a giant, leaping, blue-tinted tarpon against the background of a stilted fish house. Myra Roberts’ paintings tell stories – wondrous stories of the islands’ past and present – with a little fantasy thrown in.

Myra and her family moved to Sanibel Island in 1999 and still live on the island. To this day, she’s still charmed and inspired by its rural temperament: “You have a feel on Sanibel that it doesn’t change in time,” she says.

Here’s a peek into Myra’s studio and home life:

• Medium and style: Impressionistic oil paintings with intensely vivid, Fauvist colors. “My work really is a lot about color – arbitrary, like blue hair and gold skies.”

• Favorite subjects: Tropical scenes, people and endangered wildlife filtered through a vintage lens.

• When she’s not painting: Which is hardly ever, it seems, she’s sipping lemongrass tea, tending the organic garden where she grows the ingredients or biking with her husband, Wes. They’ve biked 48 states with their three kids, now adults. Many of her paintings incorporate bicycles.