Grain Surfboards Presents “Salty Drawers”

[caption id="attachment_66045" align="alignnone" width="640"] Peter Spacek's “She Oyster,” scrimshaw on aged surfboard.[/caption]

Grain Surfboards opened “Salty Drawers,” a collection of drawings, paintings and scrimshaw from the sketchbooks, archives and surfboards of Paton Miller and Peter Spacek, on July 1. An artist chat on July 8 at 7 p.m. will connect the art to the artist’s travel and adventure. The show will remain on view at the Amagansett gallery and workshop through July 16.

After leaving his home in Hawaii to journey through Asia in 1974, Paton Miller arrived on the East End with a collection of travel inspired artworks that won him an art scholarship from Southampton College. Graduating with honors, he launched his career in over 20 solo and numerous group exhibitions in New York City and throughout the country. Today, his works are exhibited internationally and his paintings are now among the most widely collected works between the East End of Long Island and New York City.

“The work is a combination of life’s experience and imagination — one foot in the known and another in a place not known. I begin most days drawing with no particular idea of what I’m going to make. I ‘open the door’ and find what’s there. What keeps me coming back is that there is almost always something there — something very specific,” Miller said.

[caption id="attachment_66046" align="alignright" width="435"] “Tube Shoot” by Peter Spacek.[/caption]

In 2009, Peter Spacek began showing a technique he developed — calling it modern scrimshaw — where he etches into the fiberglass of aged surfboards. He has exhibited on both coasts including a solo show at the California Surf Museum, and contributed his images and graphics to films including “12 Miles North” a Nike documentary about the first documented California African American surfer, Nick Gabaldan.

Known locally for his cartoons in The East Hampton Start, Spacek is also an accomplished surfer.

“My stuff of late has gone, more or less, into three directions: wave riding images that attempt to authentically evoke some parts of the surf experience in a graphic, stripped-down way; highly detailed images of natural and man-made phenomena that I call pseudo-scientific; and then, I allow the cartoonist in me to come out.” Spacek said. “I pull random drawings from my sketchbooks that I find amusing or compelling and then flush them out into large full-blown pieces. Most of the above is executed in my usual way: scratching, engraving and inking into various pieces of ‘dead’ surfboards or sometimes, the entire board.”

The Grain Surfboards Gallery is located at 11 Indian Wells Highway in Amagansett, behind the Mobil Station. For more information, call (631) 267-9283 or visit grainsurfboards.com/ny.