"Ride em' in!"

We are on our third day of rain on the East Coast, but I am feeling all sunny and envigorated. I dropped two littles at school this morning  and ventured to Mattituck. At breakfast yesterday I was awestruck by the latest art showcase on Love Lane Kitchen's wall. There was one picture in particular that brought out so many memories and emotions. I spent all my early childhood summers at my grandmother's cabana, up island. We got there first thing in the morning and enjoyed our buttered rolls in the sand while everyone around us opened their cabanas for the day. I would impatiently wait for all the chairs and tables and table clothes to be set out so that we could grab our towels and run to the ocean. Our family knew everyone in the cabanas around us and we would stop and say our good mornings on the stroll down. It took forever, but by the time we got there a lot of our friends would already be in the water and I loved to float and jump the whitewash with them. I remember basking in the sun on my towel watching the older kids and their parents bodysurfing the waves. I couldn't wait until I could swim well enough to that as well. It was so relaxing to watch the waves come in and out and see all the bodies under and over the waves. It looked exactly like this:

                                                     "Ride em' in!"

I now have moved back to New York with my littles and they LOVE the ocean like I do. I feel so lucky to have found this painting and to be able to have purchased it. We will look at it all winter until we can get back into those waves!

The artist is Patricia Feiler. She lives in Mattituck, NY.  Throughout her career as a music educator in the Eastport and Southold Public School districts she continued to study and hone her passion for art. When she retired she began to delve even deeper and studied with many prominent artists including Linda Nemeth, Lisa Baglivi, Laura Stroh, Garance Wertmuller, James Albinson, Caleb Nelson Carter, John A. Parks at the Art Students League, and NYC and Long Island Academy of Fine Art founder, Robert Armette. Her work has been selected for numerous juried shows and is included in many private collections. Last year she won the Thomas Curie-Bell Award for her painting "SS Rendezvous and Race" at the Southold Historical Society First Annual North Fork Artists Exhibit and Competition.

Patricia is a frequent teaching artist at the WHBPAC and an active member of the East End Arts Council. She is the music director and organist at the Church of Atonement, Quogue and Church of the Redeemer, Mattituck. I met her today at her studio located in the Donald Feiler Architect Building on Main Road in Mattituck.

She frequently depicts scenes of area beaches (my picture was from Cupsogue Beach on Labor Day), sailboat races, farms and vineyards. Her process on my picture was from photograph to drawing to painting. Here are a few that can be purchased now:

Patricia and her husband are traveling through the southwest this winter, so be on the lookout for desert pictures soon! I'll leave with with her beautiful artist statement.

“Painting a landscape feels like music to me. There’s a rhythm that is familiar to me in the motion of the brush across the canvas. The entire process has an energy and a crescendo. 

I begin a painting by studying a scene almost as if it were a musical score.  Blocks of color, lines, and shapes become dunes and shadows. My paintings are autobiographical and every painting has a story, a feeling, a sound, and a memory of my being in that place.

In Impressionist music the melodies of certain composers,  Debussy, Ravel, and Pat Metheny seem to disappear within shimmering harmonies. My own paintings start with detailed sketches, and then I’m  not sure how it happens, but the colors and  shapes begin to soften.  Often I have to stand back and squint to see the forms. I can only really see my paintings from a distance, yet I hear them with every brush stroke.”