Artists to Watch

Remembrance Of Things Past
Southampton painter Dinah Maxwell Smith’s brush seems to be loaded with a smidgen of nostalgia along with oil paints. Her many beachscapes peopled with sunbathers could have captured a moment at any time in the past century. A master at portraying the interplay of bright light and deep shadow, she uses rich saturated colors to make her paintings “sing.” Her work has been called “luminous…small gems” by the New York Times and “as pictorially strong as they are visually endearing” by New York magazine. Her “charged brushwork” provides “a simultaneous sense of intimacy and distance caused by the combination of close-up and blurred vision…” according to Art News. When asked what she seeks to achieve in her work, she answers: “The Aha! moment in art. The universality of recognition.”

Besides beachscapes, her subjects include still life, people, horses and dogs (many commissioned), which she executes in a painterly, impressionistic style characteristic of the Long Island School. After studying painting at the Academie Julian in Paris she received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, and has been widely exhibited at such institutions as the Parrish Art Museum. Her works are represented in many permanent collections.

Intimate Landscapes
Maryann Lucas began her career as a TV reporter and didn’t start painting till she was a homemaker and needed an identity beyond “the diapers and dirty dishes.” It was a calling that she was “meant to do,” she says. Working in oil she focuses on such “intimate landscapes” as roses climbing a trellis or a front door.  Most of her work revolves around her own domestic scenes: fruit spilling onto a table, vegetables ready for the soup pot, a vase of lilacs – which she renders in dabs of lustrous color using only natural light.“My theme is my life – looking for the extraordinary in the ordinary. As a woman spending time at home I need to see beauty in everyday surroundings.”
She is proud that her daughter, Edwina, 23, has followed in her footsteps. Edwina, who is mentoring with celebrated East End painter John Alexander, is currently painting fish – porgies or bluefish she buys at Citarella and executes with “immediacy and intimacy,” according to her mother. Both Maryann, who has painted the posters for the Sag Harbor American Music Festival for the past five years, and Edwina are represented by Sag Harbor’s Grenning Gallery.

Narrating Memories
At any given time Paton Miller seems to have an exhibition of his work being shown somewhere in the Hamptons or elsewhere. Currently he has smallish works on paper and larger oils on view through October at Sayre Barn, the newly renovated outbuilding at the Southampton Historical Society. Another show is up at the White Room Gallery in Bridgehampton through July 6. A show in Los Angeles closed in late June, but he’ll be in a group show in New York in the fall.
Miller, who hails from Hawaii, spent 24 years working out of Fairfield Porter’s studio after the legendary artist died. Now working from his Tuckahoe studio, his intensely moody paintings reflect “what’s happened to me in my life” filtered through his memory. “I’m a narrative painter,” he says. The avid surfer also has a farm in Costa Rica, and many of his pieces depict his neighbors there. “I wanted them to get to know who I was.” While his works tell stories, their edgy quality is a result of his propensity for manipulating his surfaces. “They’re like a construction site—I piece them together with nails, glue, whatever. I even collage my own work.”

Miller’s work is in the collections of the American embassies in Abu Dhabi and Bogota, and in several museums.

Evoking Emotion
While Amagansett painter Michelle Murphy Strada works in many mediums from mixed media to collage, she is best known for her Wyethesque realist water colors. In her early career, while juggling jobs as a flight attendant and Ford model, she studied whatever art she could get her “hands on” including drawing and sculpture at such institutes as the Art Students’ League in New York. She won many awards, and most notably was elected as a signature lifetime member of the American Watercolor Society, one of youngest artists to achieve that honor.

In her water colors her intent is to portray a momentary feeling that resonates with her and evokes emotion in the onlooker. In a vase of tulips she aimed to not only make them “pop” but also to capture an “ominous quality symbolic of the darkness and lightness in life.” Now, at a turning point in her career, she is focusing on self-portraits that express a part of her own psyche. One such work is actually a rendering of Tom Waits replete with cigarette and fedora while another is of Audrey Hepburn when, as Holly Golightly, she finds her cat in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. She’s also pursuing several other “iconic images that are parts of me that I haven’t expressed yet.”

Represented by the Gerard Peters Gallery in New York and Santa Fe, she has exhibited in many galleries and museums across the country and has works in private collections including that of Sean Lennon and McDonald’s. She was recently chosen to paint a portrait of Guild Hall, which was presented to board member Mickey Strauss upon his retirement.