By Andrea Martone
A city that makes artists
St. Petersburg has built a reputation as one of Florida’s most art-forward cities, with galleries, studios, and public art woven into daily life. That creative atmosphere matters, because it gives artists not only an audience, but also a landscape that feels like a living subject. In a place where sunsets, mangroves, seabirds, and neighborhoods all seem painted in strong color already, artists often find both inspiration and identity.
Barbara Beyhl fits that tradition in a distinctly personal way. According to the Morean Arts Center, she came to painting after a long career in pharmaceuticals, eventually choosing to make artistic expression central to her life after returning to St. Petersburg. Her story suggests a familiar Florida theme: reinvention. Many artists arrive in St. Pete by accident or necessity but stay because the city gives them room to become themselves.
Bill Castleman is a St. Petersburg-area artist whose plein-air paintings of Florida landscapes share Barbara Beyhl’s love of local scenery, nature, and representational work, though he works more broadly in painting and has a background that includes teaching and illustration.
Barbara Beyhl
Beyhl’s art is shaped by discipline, study, and a late but decisive commitment to creativity. The Morean profile describes her as a self-taught artist who pursued classes and instruction after returning to St. Petersburg, developing her style primarily as a representational watercolor painter. That background gives her work a sense of earned confidence rather than easy improvisation.
What stands out in Beyhl’s career is the way she treated art not as a hobby, but as a second vocation. After years in a different profession, she made time for drawing, painting, and artistic growth, studying with local artists and at major institutions such as the Art Students League in New York. That mix of local grounding and broader training reflects a hallmark of many serious regional artists: they are deeply tied to their home city while remaining open to wider influences.
Her work also mirrors a Florida sensibility that values clarity and atmosphere. Watercolor, with its transparency and unpredictability, suits scenes that depend on light, distance, and shifting color. In St. Petersburg, where weather and water constantly alter the view, that medium feels especially apt. Beyhl’s career is a reminder that an artist’s strongest subject is sometimes the place that reshaped her life.
Bill Castleman
Bill Castleman is a longtime St. Petersburg-area painter known for his plein-air oil paintings of Florida’s coastal landscapes, shorelines, and beaches. Born in Pensacola in 1940, he has deep roots in the state and has made capturing the Sunshine State’s natural beauty his signature focus.
Castleman’s path to art started young but took turns through military service and other professions. After working as a technical illustrator for the U.S. Marine Corps, he studied at the Ringling School of Art and Design in Sarasota, earning a certificate in design and illustration. Those skills carried into careers in aerospace and advertising, followed by 25 years teaching art.
Now in his 80s and based near St. Petersburg (with a studio presence in Seminole), he paints full-time as Artist in Residence at Bill Castleman Fine Art, often through the Old Artist Coop. His work appears in local spots like the Suntan Art Center, Rumfish Grille in St. Pete Beach, and events such as Morean Arts Center’s Paint St. Pete competitions.
Painting style
Castleman paints outdoors on location, using a light, deft touch to bring freshness and vitality to scenes of sea, sand, mangroves, and Florida light. His representational style invites viewers into the energy of everyday coastal views, much like Barbara Beyhl’s place-based watercolors, though he favors oils for their richness. He has joined Beyhl in events like the 2024 Morean Iconic: Paint St. Pete, where his piece “Spa Beach” was auctioned. Reach him via Facebook or email at bcastleman58@gmail.com.
Why they matter
Beyhl and Castleman matter because they show how St. Petersburg’s art scene is not defined by one style or generation. One artist came to painting after a long first career and built a disciplined watercolor practice; the other paints outdoors on location, using a light, deft touch to bring freshness and vitality to scenes of sea, sand, mangroves, and Florida light. Together, they represent the city’s ability to support reinvention at every stage of life.
They also reflect a larger truth about Florida art. The state can be dismissed as a backdrop, but in the hands of artists like these, it becomes the main subject. Light, birds, water, shoreline, and human presence all become part of a visual language that is both local and universal. That is part of what makes St. Petersburg such a fertile artistic home.
In the end, Barbara Beyhl and Bill Castleman are not just artists who happen to live in St. Petersburg. They are artists whose work helps define how the city sees itself.