As far as studio spaces go, Lauren Marshall’s is about as good as it gets. In her family’s historic home just over Siesta Key North Bridge, you can find Marshall in her Coconut Treehouse Studio—an airy extension of their house, where the coastal breeze flutters in through shuttered windows and domestic life with her husband and two sons can be sequestered with the slide of a screen door. This is where Marshall, a proud alum of the Ringling College of Art and Design, spends her mornings and as much of her days as she can before her blissfully hectic domestic life pulls her back in. Specializing in “coastal impressionism,” Marshall’s painting unabashedly incorporates who she is and where she comes from. This June, in celebration of the semiquincentennial, Marshall launched her 250 Americana Collection. Abstract takes on American flags, still lifes and vignettes—like To The Ocean’s White With Foam—populate the collection, coalescing Marshall’s colorful palette and unique style with her love for her country. “I’ve had members of my family serve in every war going back to the American Revolution,” says Marshall. “I have immediate family members that still serve today. Our favorite family holiday growing up was always the Fourth of July. I knew that I loved this patriotic theme and that this collection was something in my heart that I needed to share.” Marshall believes that her coastal impressionistic style, in which the environment in which she lives blends with the fine art technique of impressionism, stems partially from her childhood in Kansas. “The entire impressionistic movement was about pushing back against the establishment and the elite upper class. As an artist coming from a small farm town in Kansas, what resonated with me was this concept that although I didn’t grow up around fine art or fancy museums, I still could make something beautiful and had something to say,” she says. Marshall’s work can be seen elsewhere around Sarasota, including at the St. Regis Longboat Key Resort. Based on her painting, The Sarasota Girls, Marshall was commissioned to create The Matriarchs, a depiction of seven, trailblazing Sarasota women: Mable Ringling, Marie Selby, Caroline Astor, Lora Whitney, Eugenie Clark and Katherine Klauber. The Sarasota Girls, which depicts Clark, Ringling, Selby and Bertha Palmer, remains one of Marshall’s favorite works, and helped kickstart her fine art career three years ago. “There was a call for art from the local nonprofit Halo Arts and the theme was pushing limits. I thought of the women that founded Sarasota and were here first, and how they pushed limits of what women were expected to do at the time,” says Marshall. “I asked four of my good friends to dress up in costume and pose on Siesta Key Beach at sunset—I thought that this might be only something I cared about or found inspiring, but it turned out that every other female in the tri-county area did as well.”  SRQ