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Artist Watch – A Selection of Diverse Local Talent

Geoff Kuzara, who grew up on a small subsistence farm at the foot of the Big Horn Mountains in Wyoming, still lives part of the year in that state while also residing in the Hamptons. Having spent his childhood with drill presses, lathes, welders, farm machinery, and livestock learning the basics of engineering and fabrication, it’s no wonder he’s gone on to produce hundreds of wheel-thrown stoneware pieces, dozens of chairs, tables, benches, custom furnishings, and countless small sculptures from multiple materials. He also makes watercolors, oil paintings, and graphite drawings.

“Of all of these media, I’m most challenged by and drawn to wood,” he says. “And the inexhaustible dynamics and beauty of the mobile.” Of one of his mobiles currently hanging in the Grenning Gallery in Sag Harbor, Laura Grenning says: “It gyrates and turns with the breezes that waft by, creating a delightfully mesmerizing exchange of energy and motion, a hundred percent natural.” Many of the artist’s pieces take several hundred hours to make –time he’s found spending his winters in Springs. His collectors include Matt Lauer, Michael Saperstein and Julie Hillman. GrenningGallery.com

Taking a cue from Banksy, a Water Mill artist who calls herself ‘The Tanster’, has been distributing free artworks around the South Fork in recent months. The brightly spray-painted pieces, some of which were stenciled with the face of a helmeted Valkyrie, have shown up outside venues from the Golden Pear Café to the 7-Eleven –all with the message: “Please pay it forward to women with cancer.” Most pieces disappeared within hours of installation, which is okay with The Tanster, who posts three or four images per day.

The Sorbonne-educated artist hopes that the project, which she calls @gemeinschaftprojekt (Community Project in German), will inspire people to donate money to The Coalition for Women’s Cancers at Southampton Hospital cwcshh.org. “The initiative also exists to share love of art and community,” she says. Also an author and playwright, her novel, In Truth There is Sympathy, was published in 1996, while her plays have been performed Off Broadway.

Sagaponack artist María Schön was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, of Venezuelan parents. Though her education and career developed entirely in the United States, she stays true to her ancestral roots in her atmospheric landscapes, inspired by her time spent in her parents’ home country. Her large-scale vistas combine “rolling land masses, swollen oceans and luminous skies” with subtle reference to human figuration. Tapping into the power of nature and the feminine, she says her works are “inspired by a deeply felt relationship with the tropical landscapes of Venezuela” and are as much “an exploration of the nature of painting as of memory of the natural environment and nostalgia for a landscape where I enjoyed a sense of place.” Her works are found in the collections of the Mayo Clinic, Citibank, Johnson & Johnson, and other corporate and private collections in Italy, Venezuela, Mexico and the United States. MariaSchon.com

In February artist Greg Miller partnered with fellow surfer and Sotheby’s realtor John Healey to open Surfari Crossroads, a Sag Harbor gallery selling Miller’s surfboard art. Each one-of-a-kind vintage board – some dating from the 1950s and sourced from Long Island’s oldest surf shops – have been hand painted and collaged by Miller who says that he layers his work with “paintings on top of paintings on top of paintings.” The collages might be a cover torn from a magazine or maybe from a favorite book by John Steinbeck (who lived in Sag Harbor), which are then glued on before being painted, sprayed and resined over – all to “build up an abstract history.” Miller, who grew up as a surfer dude in California, began painting large canvases before rescuing abandoned boards. Only having lived a few months in the Hamptons, he works out of a Springs’ studio lined with boards in various stages of completion. His mission is to give these odes to an almost forgotten surf culture “a new life.” SurfariCrossroads.com

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