Barbara Groot Gets Creative In Springs

Twirling a wall brush absentmindedly in her right hand, Barbara Groot took a few steps back from her canvas.She considered the vibrant oranges and abstract yellows, intermixed with splashes of blue and green, with her Corbusier-framed blue eyes. The hues danced together, with Ms. Groot as their choreographer.

“Oh, this is just something I’m working on, here and there,” she mused last Friday afternoon inside her Springs studio. “Let’s see, let’s see ...”

She pivoted on her left foot, facing her work space to dip the brush into a gallon of brown paint. She mixed the dark pigment into a swirl of orange and residual yellow on her informal palette—the paper-covered tabletop—and smiled.

With a certain haphazard care, she dabbed at the canvas for about 10 seconds and backed up again.

“Hmm, what do you think?” she said. “I actually quite like it. It’s the most wonderful thing, you know, when a happy accident turns out to be such a beautiful surprise.”

This was not the first time Ms. Groot had come to this realization. She is a master of serendipity, rolling with life’s punches and adapting to her every environment, from Manhattan and the East End to Europe and Asia. But it all began in San Bernardino, California, amid the celery and lima bean fields of her youth, with no aspirations of fine art.

“That was a sweet place, way back then,” Ms. Groot recalled the morning before, sipping coffee in her studio’s breakfast nook overlooking Hog Creek. ”I used to draw and sew, and at one point my father said to me, ‘Oh, you could be a fashion designer.’ And that just lit me up.”

After studying costume design at the University of California at Los Angeles, the budding fashionista opened a custom beachwear store, The Hut, in Santa Monica before closing shop in 1963 to travel the globe with a $2,000 round-the-world ticket from Pan American World Airways. “That was in my other life,” Ms. Groot smirked.

Her first stop was Frankfurt, Germany, via New York, where she and her then-husband, David, bought a Volkswagen and hit the road, traveling for six months with Arthur Frommer’s “Europe On $5 A Day” as a trusty guide. Then it was off to Greece and Turkey. When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, the young couple was in India. “The Indians were just devastated,” she said, “as we were.”

Their final destination was Japan before returning to the States—Honolulu, Hawaii, one year after they had left. Disappointed that the city resembled Miami Beach, not the exotic rural destination Ms. Groot had seen it as a decade earlier, they didn’t stay long. They headed back to Los Angeles, where Ms. Groot studied draping and pattern-making, and eventually worked for several major fashion houses in Manhattan—effectively ending her marriage and opening countless new doors, including that of knitwear designer Eileen Mislove.

The women met one summer in the mid-1970s under the Fire Island sun as summer-share neighbors. A quick friendship formed, as well as a business—“Groot and Mislove,” a textile print design studio—once they returned to Manhattan. There, Ms. Groot began taking fine art classes with Ms. Mislove, leading her to an art supply store, where she met the one and only Alberto Herszage.

As rapidly as their flame heated up, it cooled. He disappeared—until, a year later, when Ms. Groot’s phone rang.

“I was mystified. He was intense, and he wanted to have dinner,” she giggled girlishly at the memory. “I said, ‘Sure, yes, why not.’ And then I very quickly figured out he was married. Yeah. Then he moved to Hawaii, got divorced and called me, asking if I like Hawaii. I said, ‘Oh God, no. I don’t like Hawaii at all.’ So that was the end of that, for a while.”

Fourteen years, to be exact. Until her phone rang, again.

“I don’t know if this is accurate, but I kid and say, ‘Alberto would call me about every five years,’” she laughed. “We’ve been together, now, 16 years. I think a relationship—I really do believe—the sex comes and goes, it comes and goes. But you’ve got to make this connection,” she tapped her forehead, “the mind connection. And if that is really good, it’s goooooood.”

When the artist isn’t spending time with her beau, or taking local yoga classes, she can be found in her studio, an outlet for her creativity. Most recently, it has manifested in a series of small paper collages—they will be on view at Ille Arts in Amagansett starting Friday—a departure from her nature-inspired, large-scale paintings that will also hang in the gallery.

“I think, sometimes, I really feel not in charge. I’m not consciously in charge,” she said of creating art. “It’s coming from somewhere else. And the best things, of course, come from somewhere else.”

Ille Arts in Amagansett will exhibit the third annual “Life in the Abstract,” featuring work by Barbara Groot, John Haubrich and Dru Frederick, from Friday, October 31, through Monday, November 10. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, November 1, from 5 to 8 p.m. For more information, call (631) 905-9894, or visit illearts.com.