If he was not sure of his success, many others were, and soon he was showing his “new kind” of pictures to an appreciative audience in New York galleries—first in Richard Bellamy’s trailblazing Green Gallery and then with his longtime dealer, Leo Castelli and beyond. Over the next several decades, Rosenquist would create works whose look and sensibility were unprecedented, epitomized by the colossal F-111, 1964–65. This radically complex, 10-by-86-foot painting (now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York) juxtaposes fragments including a hair dryer and a plate of spaghetti with a mushroom cloud and the fuselage of the eponymous fighter jet, all set in a dizzying space of delicious saturated color and depicted with dazzling figurative precision. With their exaggerated scale, brash palette and mass-media subjects scrambled together like a digital mash-up predicting a moment 40 years in the future, F-111 and his other paintings of the period marked Rosenquist as one of the leading figures of the rapidly ascending cultural phenomenon known as Pop art.

Yet as the late curator Walter Hopps observes in the catalogue for the 2003 retrospective of Rosenquist’s work Hopps organized for the Guggenheim Museum in New York, despite all the artist shared with contemporaries like Lichtenstein and Warhol, he was always on a very personal path. Beyond his decision to eschew the emphatic flatness of most Pop for intricate three-dimensional environments where his heterogeneous pictorial elements could interact freely, Hopps notes, Rosenquist has always relied on his own remarkable skills as a painter, rather than any mechanical procedures like silkscreen and stencil, to produce his dramatic effects. “He is a superb painter in a very traditional sense,” Hopps writes, “producing very untraditional images.”

Rosenquist’s unconventional approach has served him well over the decades, through shifts toward and against his brand of high-octane conceptual realism. Although his career was briefly sidetracked following a serious car accident in 1971 (his wife and son spent months recovering in the hospital), he was soon painting again, and prolifically, making works whose subject matter continued to range widely through the familiar and exotic, typically mixing both. In Paper Clip, 1973, one of his first major pictures following the accident, he created a vivid choreography of advertising and industrial forms rendered in both bold color and elegant grisaille; the astronomy-themed Star Thief, 1980, a signal work of that decade, turned its attention to the heavens but brought bits of the consumer world (strips of bacon, twisted wires, the face of a fashion model), like metaphysical space junk, along for the ride. And in his extraordinary trio of huge paintings collectively titled The Swimmer in the Econo-mist, commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin in 1997–98, he reaches simultaneously backward and forward by putting everything from Pop-style product logos and a passage from Picasso’s Guernica into his signature compositional spin cycle. The result is a powerful representation of the informational and material profusion of the late millennium. Rosenquist remains deeply involved in the act of painting—he’s more comfortable describing his favorite brushes and paint cups than speculating about the meaning of his work—a commitment to which the relative solitude of his Aripeka studio is well suited. (Rosenquist still keeps a work space in New York, though his second wife and the couple’s teenage daughter spend most of their time at the family’s home in the countryside north of the city.) In Florida, he has the time and space to throw himself into his work, pausing for few diversions beyond trips to favorite restaurants—we hit both a Thai place and a barbecue joint during my short stay, chauffeured each time by Rosenquist.

The heart of the Aripeka complex is the studio proper, a vast ecosystem composed of stacks of stretched canvases and tables full of paint; finished works wrapped in plastic and carefully set against the wall; a warren of workrooms, office spaces and storage areas holding a department store’s worth of tools and appliances; and a small fleet of vehicles in various states of repair, including several Mercedes sedans and a dusty Ferrari and, just outside, being slowly reclaimed by the junglelike undergrowth, what appear to be the guts of a backhoe and some sort of boat.