Beach trash used for artistic treasure
Artist’s colorful work will decorate South Beach Park
Oakland Park artist Lisa Miceli uses a piece of stryrfoam found during a beach cleanup to paint a mural on the restroom building at Fort Lauderdale South Beach Park.
An area artist is using her creativity to do something useful with the plastic straws, cigarette butts and other types of garbage that litter South Florida’s beaches.
The trash left in the sand by beachgoers is being transformed by Lisa Miceli into a colorful seascape mural on the walls of the restroom building at the City of Fort Lauderdale’s South Beach Park.
Instead of brushes, Meceli uses debris collected along the shoreline, mostly by children, to paint colorful animals and other images.
“The painting is mostly dabbing. Styro-
foam works well and it is especially bad in the ocean because it never breaks down,” she said while applying spots of brown to an outline of a turtle’s head on the north wall.
Miceli, 48, calls her program Stoked on Salt Ocean Clean Up.
On a recent weekday, a busload of children from Imagine Elementary at North Lauderdale Charter School were Miceli’s designated helpers.
After getting a lesson on turtle nesting from a representative of the Broward County Sea Turtle Conservation Program managed by Nova Southeastern University, the children were given buckets and gloves to help collect beach trash.
Digging through seaweed and stepping around sunbathers, it took only a few minutes for many of the children to have buckets filled with all sorts of debris.
One of them plunged his hand into his bucket and pulled out what looked like half of a bathing suit.
“People out here just don’t know how to recycle, they think the world is their trash can,” said Roshown Reece, 10.
Next to the mural, the kids dump out the refuse on a tarp and speak with Miceli about what they found.
“Plastic bags are the worst,” she tells them, “because the sea turtles eat jelly fish, and that’s what these look like to the turtles.”
Miceli sorts through the collected trash — looking for items with interesting textures that can be used for coloring.
A lot of plastic straws and bottle caps are among the litter collected by the children.
“Those big beach sweepers can’t pick up the smaller items. It’s turtle nesting season now and those things can be dangerous to the animals,” Miceli said.
Miceli, a Fort Lauderdale native and mother who now lives in Oakland Park, graduated from the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, and will be working on the mural for about a month.
“I hope to finish one wall per week,” she said.
People can follow her progress and learn more about using beach trash as art on the Facebook page SOS Ocean Clean Up.
“I am encouraging families, campers and students to come by and grab a bucket,” she said.
I’m here Monday through Friday, painting.”