When Shane Martin picked up a paintbrush for the first time at 35, he wasn't looking for a calling. He was looking for something to do at 2 a.m.

A New Orleans-born, Tampa-raised entrepreneur who'd spent years in the music and nightlife world, Martin had recently moved to Sarasota to work as a personal trainer. Art was a new hobby—something he did on his own time after stumbling across a YouTube video of German abstract painter Gerhard Richter dragging a squeegee across a huge canvas. “That looks like something I could do," he remembers thinking. He went to the art supply store the next day. A personal training client changed everything. One morning she asked what he'd be doing if he could do anything he wanted. He heard himself say art. She asked to see his work. A few weeks later, she handed him the keys to a studio on U.S. 301 and signed him up for his first art show. “‘You're going to paint,’ she told me,” Martin recalls. That was late 2020. By 2022, he was doing 35 shows a year.

The Blüm Collection—the sculptural floral series that has become the signature offering of Martin’s Sarasota studio, Dream Create Collective—began with another unexpected encounter, this one on a delivery road trip to Las Vegas. A client who'd commissioned his work for her home said she wanted to explore some new ideas, and she pulled out a Chanel design book. Inside, the endpapers revealed a repeating black-and-white pattern of camellias—Coco Chanel’s favorite flower. His client asked if he thought he could paint it. Martin spent the better part of a year figuring out how to make the design unmistakably his own. Taking haute couture embroidery as his inspiration, he experimented with sculpting acrylic—a material thick enough to hold dimension  and eventually landed on a technique using piping bags, like those used to decorate cakes, cut at a precise angle. "It's not perfectly rounded like a pastry tip would give you,” he explains. “It's more nuanced.” The result, viewed from across a room, looks like a richly textured tapestry and up close, reveals itself as an intricate landscape of sculpted paint. He took some of those first pieces to an art show just to get some feedback. They sold immediately, so he made more—three times over before he ever got them to his client in Las Vegas. He recognized a collection in the making.

Enter Erica Fisher, Martin’s fiancée and creative partner, whose background in fluid acrylics brought a rhythmic precision to the piping process that Martin cheerfully admits surpassed his own, and a collaboration was born. Each work begins with a stencil projected onto canvas, but no two pieces are identical. The hand-piping ensures variation, and clients can now specify custom color palettes, mixed to order. The collection is designed with interiors in mind, particularly for the refined homes and commercial spaces of the Sarasota market. “To me, the Blüm Collection is timeless because it's elegant,” Martin says. “It can be edgy, it can be classic, it can be bold—but it's not screaming for attention. To me, that's fashion.”  SRQ