Shirley Otter Ambrose

by Lauren Hill

Making a life and career out of her artistic talents, Shirley Otter Ambrose has manifest her creativity in myriad ways. In the 1940s and 1950s Shirley honed her eye for detail and precision as a commercial artist. After relocating from Kansas to Crescent Beach in 1975, she opened and maintained an interior design firm in St. Augustine for thirty years. Shirley now works from her home but continues to challenge herself with new artistic techniques and mediums. She explores a self-proclaimed “smattering of different subjects” with a straightforward style that evokes a sense of serenity.

Drift: Where did you graduate from?
Shirley Ambrose: University of Kansas. Then I went to Dallas and worked for the Dallas Times Herald, one of the two newspapers that were there, and I did illustration. I guess there were 8 other artists. We had to draw everything. They would send me to a furniture store to draw the furniture to be in an ad in the paper.  You had to draw everything in the grocery ads from the grapefruit to the bananas to everything else. And clothing, I’d go to Neiman Marcus and go in their gift shop and I would draw the items that they were selling. So, it was kinda fun, but everything had to be drawn on site, hand done and into the newspaper. So it was completely different than the way it is now.D: What drew you to study commercial art?
SA: I always wanted to. I always wanted to in grade school, in high school I loved to draw. My mother insisted in high school that I take short hand, typing, and bookkeeping because it was a field for so many women at that time to work as a legal secretary or things like that. I didn’t want to. I wanted to take art in high school but you could only take so many courses. Consequently, I didn’t take art. So, when I got to college, I started taking all the art classes. D: Were there many women working as artists at the paper?
SA: All the artists were women. All the reporters were men.

D: Did the pressure of deadlines as a commercial artist take away from the fun of doing art? Or did it help?
SA: No, I loved it. I tell ya, there was pressure because you did have a deadline for the newspaper. But it was different work, and it was fun, it was challenging. And then there were different techniques. It was always different.

D: What do you like to paint?
SA: Still life, flowers, I do like beach scenes. Open spaces. When I did painting in Kansas I did a lot of wheat fields, windmills, open spaces, old barns. I’m not an abstract painter.

D: Did your subject matter change much as you moved from Kansas to Florida?
SA: It has to. Because this is what you see. You’re living with it. It’d be hard to do a beach scene in Kansas, or a wheat field down here.

D: You spoke earlier of how you like to study under different artists—
SA: I think that keeps you going, it gives you some motivation to start again.  In fact, I have to tell you, what I had more fun with, because I love crafts, I love just to make things, was when Jacob [her grandson] made the whale for his school project. It was humongous. A narwhale. And we have pictures of it every step along the way. Paper mache and wire and for the spiral thing I got a big drill bit.

D: Your work is quite varied—
SA: Yeah, one year I’ll be doing watercolors, the next year I’ll start on something else. And I’m terrible about not finishing things. I did pottery in college. I did jewelry. I do quilts, I love to sew— I’m not the best. I like to work with my hands; I’ll put it that way.

?photos by Rachel Bardin