- September 20, 2024
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Jonna “JJ” Royer can’t easily describe her artwork, so she has invented a term for it: Artography.
A picture is worth a thousand words. But Royer’s work is much more than a picture. She takes photographs of beach scenes, sunsets and Florida landmarks, such as the Bridge of Lions in St. Augustine. She prints her images on sheets of aluminum and then hand crafts massive wooden frames, some over a foot wide.
She enhances the natural grains of the wood, using hand saws and a brush grinder to pull out the texture. She then paints and decorates the frames. Some of her clients select rope trim to augment the beachy effect. But she prefers to search antique shops and flea markets for interesting metal fragments that she’ll paint and affix to the frames.
Royer, a resident of Ormond-by-the-Sea, has been producing her artwork for less than a year, and not in her wildest dreams would she have believed how popular it has become.
“It has taken on a life form of its own in such a short amount of time,” she said. “I didn’t expect this at all.”
Marianna Gorshelev, president of Golden Magnolia Inc., commissioned Royer to produce six pieces for the Golden Magnolia Resort & Spa in Flagler Beach. The pieces are in the main dining and front desk area.
“She just showed me the spots on each wall and said, ‘I want something here,’ and she wanted everything to be quite large. So, all of the pieces are very large, even the ones where there was just a little bit of wall to work with. The pieces are three feet tall and about two feet wide. So, everything is grand in scale,” Royer said.
Two of the pieces are six feet long and almost four feet tall. One is a custom piece installed over the mantel of the resort’s mirror-tiled fireplace. The frame wraps around the main image and three smaller images underneath.
FROM PHOTOGRAPHY TO ARTOGRAPHY
Royer began her career as a freelance travel writer and photographer. From there she became a boudoir photographer and then went into family photography.
After she and her husband moved to Ormond-by-the-Sea a year and half ago, beach photography became the natural next step, she said.
Royer has always considered herself an artist.
“I call what I do artography, because photography in itself is such an art,” she said.
These days everyone has a cellphone camera in their pocket, she said, but that does not make them a photographer.
“The main difference is the artistry in the way I’m looking to compose the picture or the way I’m looking to pose you,” said Royer.
Last fall, she decided to sell her photographs at art shows, so she and her husband began attending shows to research what was out there.
“What I realized is there are a million photographers at every art show, and if I wanted to sell my photography, I had to make it unique in some way,” she said.
She wound up partnering with her father whose hobby is woodworking.
“I'm a very creative person. I'm not a mathematician, and he's just the opposite, so we make a great team. I would sketch something, and I'd say, I'm thinking of doing this frame. And he would come up with questions. ‘Why do you want that wood? How thick do you want it to be?’ It’s been a great partnership.”
She began bringing her work to area art shows last spring.
“I think I only did three, maybe four shows, and I haven't been able to catch breath. It has been so wildly successful. Through word of mouth, people coming around. It has blown my mind and has blown up my expectations.”
— JONNA ‘JJ’ ROYER
“I think I only did three, maybe four shows, and I haven't been able to catch my breath. It has been so wildly successful,” she said. “Through word of mouth, people coming around. It has blown my mind and has blown up my expectations.”
Clients are buying her beach scenes with distressed wood frames and mounting them outside in their pool areas. The aluminum is non-corrosive, so the pieces can be displayed indoors or out.
Royer met Gorshelev at Art in the Park at Rockefeller Gardens, five minutes after the show had closed. Royer always makes sure she’s the last person to pack up, just for those situations.
They arranged to meet at the resort, and Gorshelev explained what she was looking for.
“She said she wanted (the pieces) to be dramatic. And she basically gave me full reign,” Royer said. “She has a really, cool antique door in the resort. And she says, ‘I want this door, the essence of this door to be what you do.’ And so, I took several pictures of this door from every angle, close-ups of it, and I used that as a guide for creating my frames.”
Royer is a photographer, but photos of her artwork do not do them justice, she said. You have to see them in person.
“Of course I post videos and pictures on Instagram and people will comment on them and say they're so beautiful, but then they'll come to a show or they’ll come to my house to see them and they're amazed,” she said. “To see them in person is something that can’t be captured by taking a picture.”
