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It was the high desert and rusty rugged landscape made of dreams—a palette of colors so strong it captivated Bridgehampton artist Jim Gingerich for months on end.
From his studio’s perch overlooking Zion National Park in Utah, he watched as the low humidity gave way to the most dynamic light, shadow and contrast he had ever seen—the fodder for his latest series of paintings, “Out West,” on view this weekend at Sara Nightingale Gallery in Water Mill—and an appropriate backdrop for his dramatic return to the East End, a year and a half in the making.
“I still think about the magnitude of the West, now that I’m back,” Mr. Gingerich said last week in his native Texan drawl during a telephone interview. “The landscape there has gone through a lot of geological changes, so much history and these canyons with all these vertical faces around you, these great towering walls. It’s similar to Manhattan, but obviously very different. It’s the perfect place to paint.”
The day he arrived in Manhattan was May 1, 1976, shortly after graduating from the University of Oregon. It was a departure from his college days spent driving his Volkswagen bus through the swath of western states, he said.
He settled into the neighborhood that is now Tribeca.
“I paid $150 a month for my loft. It was a different time,” he said with a laugh. “I knew that if I wanted to be a professional artist and make my life about making art, that New York was and still is the center of the art universe. Oh, I loved it. Manhattan in the ’70s was like my ‘Moveable Feast,’ like Hemingway in the Left Bank of Paris in the ’20s and ’30s. Full of artists and dancers and poets and actors.”
He would stay for 16 years before moving in 1991 to the East End, where he quickly wove himself into the artistic fabric of the Hamptons.
“He’s sort of iconic, he’s a landmark in himself,” said his longtime admirer and friend Graham Leader, who curated the “Out West” show. “I used to see him at the beach, I’d see him at the side of the road, the fields. Wherever he was, he was painting.”
In March 2015, nearly a quarter century of painting blues and greens had come and gone, Mr. Gingerich said. It was time for a break. He packed up his oils, brushes and canvases, and headed back from whence he came, back to what drew him: the vast space, the light and freedom of the West.
When he wasn’t working, he took road trips, eventually racking up 20,000 miles on his rental car. He would drive to Yellowstone and Yosemite national parks, and up and down the Oregon Coast, stopping to make paintings along the way.
But on a typical day, Mr. Gingerich could be found painting in his studio every morning and down by the stables in the late afternoon. That is where he met Lucy, a 20-year-old white fox trotter with a gentle gait, a sweet disposition, and a patient, wise aura.
“Riding with her was like a trance,” he said. “There was a dog named Al who’d come along with us. And it was just the three of us, most of the time. And the trance would begin with a creak of the saddle leather and the horse’s footfalls. The desert is very quiet; sound does not travel as well in dry air. It moves faster in humid air, so there was a stillness about it. This place wasn’t very windy, so there was a deep spiritual quiet about the whole thing.
“And Lucy and I, we quite bonded. I was considering buying a horse—even her. But then things changed.”
Mr. Gingerich had just left his studio for the day and headed for the barn, just as he’d done 300 times before. He recalled feeling that he was on a roll with his art—his paintings were getting better and better, closer to what he was after, he said.
He said hi to Lucy, saddled her up, and they headed in the direction of the Smithsonian Butte foothills, a wilderness that transported him back in time, he said, like it could just as well be the 1800s.
They had barely left the barn when she went down.
“She tripped on something and was on her four knees. I thought she might stumble more, so I sort of jumped over her neck to get out of the way, to get clear of her,” he said. “I didn’t see it because I was tumbling on the ground, but she tried to stand up and lost her balance and fell again, and she landed right on me.”
A bit of a laugh escaped him. “That was a shock,” he said. “I saw the saddle horn and the saddle and her back coming straight at me, and I was like, ‘Oh, no.’ I felt something in my pelvis pop. She got to her feet and she just sort of walked off as I was assessing the damage. I tried to stand up, and I couldn’t.”
He half-crawled, half-dragged himself to a nearby fence post and tried to use it as a crutch to stand, but couldn’t get off the ground, he said. So he laid down on the ground and called out for help until a neighbor finally heard.
“There wasn’t much I could do,” the 64-year-old said. “The ambulance took a half hour to get there and I was in a lot of pain then. I hadn’t even had a car accident—I hadn’t had any accidents! Never broken a bone, never put a dent in a car. It was the first. Thank God for morphine.”
The first surgery in Utah reattached his left leg to his pelvis, which was fractured the whole way through, he said. By the time his six-week follow-up rolled around, he was on his way to recovery in Texas, living with family. He was just about ready to get rid of his crutches and switch to a cane when his doctors told him some of the screws had broken off, and they had to go in again.
“I stayed pretty positive,” he said. “I just wanted to get better, that was the number one desire that I had—just to walk again. And whatever it would take for that to happen, that’s what I wanted.”
Restricted to bed rest, Mr. Gingerich couldn’t paint. “Painting, to me, is like a dance. I paint standing up and I’m moving around very quickly, and that kind of movement wasn’t available,” he said. So he traded his canvases for a sketchbook and focused on his drawing.
“Oddly enough, I just had to sketch Lucy in various scenarios. And in every one of them, I was shooting the horse with a gun. There’s a lot of stuff going on for me,” he said. “Painting is kind of a catharsis anyway, for whatever’s going on. You can’t really hide any place in the painting—or drawing.”
Five months and nearly 2,500 miles have put both physical and emotional distance between Mr. Gingerich and Lucy, who was much more than just a horse. She was his companion and friend, a relationship that is now complicated, at best.
“I’m feeling fine about her now,” he said. “She’s fine. She’s going about her business.”
He sees her in his paintings and in his mind, but he said he is moving forward. His daily ritual now finds him at Long Beach in Noyac every day, where he has swam for the last six weeks, slowly regaining strength in his left leg.
“It’s the only thing I’m cleared to do, and so I do it well,” he said. “One day, I swam three and a half miles. I’m actually at Long Beach now, sitting outside my car. When I get off the phone, I’ll go take a swim.”
There, the air is humid and heavy, not dry. The groan of the leather saddle replaced by the lapping of the water. Lucy’s gentle trotting gait, her clip-clops against the hard earth, a sound of the past.
This is his sanctuary now. He is still in a trance. And he is at peace.
“Out West,” featuring recent paintings by Jim Gingerich, will open with a reception on Saturday, October 1, from 5 to 9 p.m. at Sara Nightingale Gallery in Water Mill. A suggested donation of $20 will support the artist’s medical expenses. The work will remain on view on Sunday, October 2, from noon to 5 p.m. For more information, call 631-793-2256 or visit saranightingale.com. To contribute to Mr. Gingerich’s recovery fund, visit crowdrise.com/jim-gingerichs-horse-riding-accident.
on Sep 27, 2016