East End Works Targeted In Art Show Theft

When North Sea-based artist Maggie Shively arranged nearly two dozen of her paintings in a booth at an up-island art fair earlier this month, she never imagined that her work would fly off the easels like hotcakes.

At least that is how the artist said she would like to positively refer to the larceny of five of her oil-on-canvas paintings—valued at more than $5,500—from Gallery North’s 46th annual Outdoor Art Show in Setauket on the weekend of September 10 and 11.

“I actually have friends who have tried to put a positive spin on all this for me and have said I should feel flattered,” Ms. Shively said during a phone interview last week. “I think that’s a nice way to think about it.”

But the painter is still reeling.

Most painful for her, she said, was the loss of a 12-by-30-inch painting of the The Golden Pear Café in Southampton Village, which she said she had hoped to have prints of in time for the winter holidays. Ms. Shively had spent most of the summer working on the painting, rising early to capture the early-morning light, and was about 90 percent done, she estimated, when it was swiped—paint still wet—sometime between when she zipped her booth up at about 5 p.m. that Saturday and when she reopened it the next morning shortly before 10 a.m.

What she found that Sunday morning was an artist’s nightmare.

The easel displaying her Golden Pear painting was bare. Also missing were the 3-foot-by-4-foot “Wine and Glass,” valued at approximately $3,600, but selling at the event for $2,400; a smaller, framed painting, “Osprey Nest,” based on North Sea’s Towd Point; and a pair of roughly 5-inch-by-7-inch works, one of a seagull, the other of a piping plover, according to the artist.

“As it slowly dawned on me I literally, physically kind of crumpled,” she said. “It was a devastating feeling. Anyone who’s been through anything like a robbery is devastated. When it’s something as personal as your artwork, it’s even double.”

Ms. Shively said she had envisioned The Golden Pear painting as a popular one because “everybody has coffee at The Golden Pear when they come to Southampton,” she said.

“All during the day on Saturday the people that stopped at my booth, they weren’t Southampton people, but everybody knew The Golden Pear in Southampton,” she said, noting that they recognized the café even though its name had not yet been painted on the awning in the artwork.

“I will paint it again,” she said of her lost work. “But I am having to start over.”

Ms. Shively, who moved to the East End from Indiana in 2006, is known for painting a series of recognizable images of village businesses, namely Hildreth’s Home Goods, the Clamman Seafood Market and The Village Gourmet Cheese Shoppe, and selling prints of them for $150 apiece.

Suffolk County Police said the case is still under investigation, as is the reported theft of other pieces of artwork stolen overnight from a Boston-based artist’s booth at the same fair.

According to Judith Levy, director of Gallery North, a security guard patrolled the grounds overnight between Saturday and Sunday, although artists are advised not to leave their valuables—art included—in the tents overnight.

Ms. Shively said that she has been entering art fairs since 1999 and has never emptied her tent and had never had anything stolen until this fair. She noted that it is a lot of work to clear a tent and set up the displays again and that most artists leave theirs as is.