From July 9 to 11, the Artists Alliance of East Hampton will once again offer its Artists Studio Tour. The three day tour has been a summer tradition for more than two decades, and this time around, some 30 plus East End artists will open their doors and give the public an insider’s look at how (and where) they create, including Sag Harbor’s Rob Calvert and Ted Asnis.
Rob Calvert’s studio is one of those places you could walk by a million times and never even notice, tucked away, as it is, behind an unassuming little house on Sag Harbor’s Main Street. Quiet, meditative and solitary with pleasant views of a grass filled landscape, it’s incongruous that a space like this could exist in such close proximity to one of the village’s most well traveled streets.
But it’s a space that seems to suit Calvert well, both physically and metaphorically given his interest in cutting through the clutter to focus on what really matters. And for Calvert, what really matters is making art. His series of abstracts — some full of color, but many more rendered in black and white — line the perimeter of the space, revealing an artist who is aware of what it takes to be truly focused on the creative process.
For 30 years, Calvert made his living, not as an artist, but as an architect primarily working in the Washington D.C. area for high tech companies. Though Calvert found that architecture satisfied certain creative needs, the focus on the analytical put him in a much different place emotionally and mentally than did his art, which he pursued nights and weekends.
“I was involved in a lot of work processes — how to look at businesses and how they work. There were people, technology and environmental components,” he says. Human comfort is important in architecture. It has an obligation to perform.”
“But when I think of the origins of art, it’s that poetic place one wants to be in. Fundamentally, it’s a spiritual act. You are taking the immaterial and making it material,” he explains. “No one cares whether I take a lifetime to come up with a drawing. But when you’re on someone’s else’s clock, there are a helluva lot of expectations."
After years of living up to the expectations of others, Calvert came to a point where he realized that things needed to change. He had his own architectural firm in North Carolina and when a number of life changes came his way in a short period of time it caused him to completely re-evaluate all he was doing.
“I sold my house and laid people off,” says Calvert. “I had been painting and working, but I decided that painting is what I wanted to do full time.
“It was the realization of how life needed to be lived,” he adds. “Where was the burning point? I enjoyed architecture, but the burning point wasn’t there. It got part way to the itch, which was fine. But you get to be midlife and you start thinking about what’s important.”
“It was more important for me to try and figure out how to do a really good drawing,” Calvert says. “If it took a lifetime to do it, it was worth more than the steady employment.”
So Calvert began his fulltime career as an artist, understanding that the way to process the external turmoil he was experiencing in life was to go inside and bring it out through his painting. Though, he readily admits, the results weren’t always what others would deem commercially viable.
“I did something called scenes from a memorial garden, they were landscape pieces,” explains Calvert. “Although they were recognizable as landscapes, the subject matter was garish and difficult to look at. A gallery owner said, ‘I’d love to show it, but the subject matter is a problem.’”
Calvert, who had been classically trained in art, realized he need to find a different way into what he hoped to explore with his work. It turns out that it was his architectural training, not his art school education, that provided the answer.
“I was too close to things at the time,” acknowledges Calvert. “I had sort of lost everything, including my mind a bit. Why not lose some other things I thought were near and dear?”
“When I studied architecture, I was encouraged to see things from a different perspective,” he adds. “That was an object lesson — for you to draw this certain way to illustrate what you want. Okay, so you can’t draw it that way? Then find another way to convey what you’re feeling.”
Calvert notes it was by revisiting the traditional methods he had long relied on that he truly reached the heart of the interior — and what he wanted to convey in his work.
“It gave me greater confidence to work, and greater belief that it could come more directly with what I was feeling,” he says. “The landscape became the interior. There’s nothing novel about that, the only world left to explore is within. But what tools do you take with you? There’s not just one way. If there’s not one way then have to be willing to use what feels right, and what emerges is inherently true if what you feel is authentic and real and moves the organs of the body.”
“It’s being able to go in after it and bring it back,” he says.
Calvert is an artist who suffers for his art. He experiences toxicity issues when working with oil paint, and doesn’t much like acrylics. Recently, he branched out on by changing mediums altogether.
“I started working with ink on Mylar with the intention of going to the city and hooking up with a shop there to do some printmaking,” says Calvert. “I went to a dinner party and by chance, sat next to Dan Welden. I had no idea what he did, but I’m explaining what I’m working with, and it’s exactly what Dan work’s with.”
Calvert and Welden, a Master Printmaker, have been working in collaboration ever since. Calvert’s next project is a set of 12 prints that represent the idea of extended family. Each print will be disparate, but with superficial similarities — like any family. The multi-generational series will explore the notion of what makes us alike, how we are different and how deep are the incongruities.
If it feels like providence that Calvert would make the conscious choice to drastically change his life, and end up in Sag Harbor where he has found a new way of working and a master printer just when he needed one, maybe, in fact, it is. Or maybe he’s just very good at paying attention to the signs we are all given, but don’t often heed along the way.
“You won’t know until you spend the rest of your life finding that thing,” says Calvert.
Ted Asnis
Ted Asnis’s North Haven studio is filled with the fruits of his efforts — as is his entire home. Brilliant florals, Quiet East End landscapes and images of boats in a still harbor are juxtaposed with action packed paintings of galloping horses — complete with mud flying — from races and polo matches.
“I’m passionate about both,” says Asnis when asked about the dichotomy in his work. “It’s whatever hits me that I want to do.”
With the radio tuned to the oldies station and tubes of acrylic paint and source material scattered around his workspace, Asnis settles in to fill in the detail on a farm scene he is currently working on. It’s obviously a life that suits him well.
Asnis is an entirely self taught artist who has been coming to the East End for 25 years — he’s lived full time in North Haven for the last 11 of those years. When he was in the city, he worked as an architect, and also did illustrations for others. But once he found himself spending more time on the East End, he developed a passion for painting.
“To me the landscapes are beautiful. It’s enough to make a good man cry,” says Asnis. “I sketch sometimes on location, and I’ll use my imagination for a lot of it. Then there are many times when I just go out and photograph and work from that. Louse Point is fabulous, and all the beaches.”
A couple decades ago, if you had told Asnis he would be living in North Haven and painting on a regular basis, there’s a good chance he wouldn’t have believed you. A native of the Bronx who grew up not far from Yankee Stadium, Asnis admits that he always thought of himself as a true New Yorker.
“I never wanted to be out this far,” he confesses. “I was a city kid. Now you could have the city. I’ll take Sag Harbor — and Bridgehampton.”
Bridgehampton is where Asnis’s work can be seen on a regular basis — in Bobby Van’s restaurant where his paintings have graced the walls for the last year or so.
“It’s like my own gallery,” says Asnis who has settled into a nice routine as an artist, getting up at 6 a.m. to head into the studio before getting in a round of golf with his friends. It was through the sport that he first discovered Sag Harbor on the recommendation of a golfing buddy whose in-laws had a place on Noyac Bay.
“He said, ‘Why don’t you look for a house out here?’” recalls Asnis. “I thought, ‘I’m not going to travel from New York to Sag Harbor. I’m working.’ But he convinced me. We joined Noyac Golf Club for about $2,500, which is now $250,000.”
If there’s any difficulty in Asnis’s schedule these days, it’s fitting in art and golf. Asnis and his friends hit the course every Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Still, he manages to be prolific in his work as well, and credits his drive (no pun intended) to the inspiration of other artists around him.
“I got to know several artists out here, some who belong to Noyac Golf Club, and we used to sit around and talk,” says Asnis. “That’s the beauty of this place it has so many people in the creative world.”
“That got me to paint daily,” adds Asnis. “I think I learn something every time I paint. It’s endless.”
The East Hampton Artists Alliance Studio Tour runs Thursday, July 9 through Saturday, July 11, with studios open from10 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day. A ticket ($60 for two visitors) admits participants to all studios and is available in Sag Harbor at BookHampton and Sylvester & Company.
In addition, all of the studio tour artists will take part in the Annual Artists Alliance Membership Exhibit from July 3 to July 12 at Ashawagh Hall on Springs Fireplace Road, East Hampton. Tour goers are welcome to attend an opening party for the exhibit on Friday, July 3, from 5 to 9 p.m., as well as the closing party on July 11 at 5:30 p.m. at Ashawagh Hall. Their artwork will be specially marked as that of a Tour participant. The ticket is also good for admission to an afternoon lecture by artist Roy Kinzer at Ashawagh Hall on Sunday, July 12, at 1 p.m. Kinzer will discuss the versatility of acrylics and introduce new artist products, such as a media which allows the merging of digital printing with paint. For more information on the tour and exhibit, call 324-2225 or visit www.aaeh.org.
Top: Rob Calvert in his Sag Harbor studio
Above: Ted Asnis working on a landscape in his North Haven studio
