Water, Waves and Wabi-Sabi: Mary Heilmann’s Private Process Surfaces in Landmark Guild Hall Retrospective

In all her years working for artist Mary Heilmann, studio director Liane Thatcher has never seen her paint.

But she knows how it starts and where it ends.

Heilmann begins in a small, low chair, with her canvas lying flat on an even smaller, lower stool. She prepares her medium of choice — whether it’s ceramics, oils, acrylics, or even finger paints — and she starts.

The finished pieces — or at least a fraction of them — are now on view at Guild Hall in East Hampton in “Mary Heilmann: Water Way,” marking the 85-year-old’s first large-scale solo exhibition in the region, where she has been an integral part of the creative fabric of the community for decades from her home and studio in Bridgehampton.

“It’s a stunning show,” Thatcher said. “We’re incredibly excited and grateful to have a show like this happen while Mary is here and can really be part of it and be celebrated this way. It feels wonderful.”

Born in 1940 in San Francisco, California, Heilmann grew up along the West Coast, both in the Bay Area and Los Angeles. She took up competitive diving as a teenager and was no stranger to body surfing, and later entrenched herself in beatnik and surfing culture, which influence her work to this day.

“She is an incredibly open and kind and casual person,” Thatcher said. “Her upbringing in California really still comes across. She still uses lingo, she’ll call people ‘dudes.’ She describes herself as an old hippie.

“And yet, she has navigated by herself the New York City art world in a very successful way,” she continued. “So she was very, very driven, quite competitive and very focused, right from the beginning, on making a career as an artist.”

After earning her bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1962, and a master’s from the University of California, Berkeley in 1967, Heilmann moved to New York City in 1968 — and began showing her work immediately in a largely male-dominated arts scene, according to Melanie Crader, director of visual arts at Guild Hall.

“She brought that California sensibility to New York, which is something that hadn't been seen at the time,” she said.

Water has had a profound impact on Heilmann’s work and she has consistently chosen to live near it, both in New York and on the East End, which she has called home since the mid 1990s. “Even though she was in New York three days a week, she has only painted and made art out in Bridgehampton since that time period,” Thatcher said.

Heilmann characterizes her work as autobiographical, translating her observations into abstractions, geometric and hard-edge patterns, and often giving them titles that hint at her ideas.

“Some people figure things out on the canvas; she really has figured it out always in her head,” Thatcher said. “She has always had this attention to the world around her that can seem childlike, but she ends up making these works that can read like pure abstraction, but they're really grounded in reality — and it's her way of seeing the world.”

“Lupe” is inspired by the reflections of moving water on the ceiling of her gym’s indoor lap pool in Tribeca in the mid 1970s — her primary source of fitness at the time. “Mazatlan,” a small ceramic piece, looks at the sea on a horizon line. And for a piece like “Storm,” the artist refers to it as a “hallucinogenic wave painting,” according to Thatcher, with its sunset streaks of orange, silver, red, pink and lime green reflected on a waterscape.

“She's like a provocateur; she's trying to be naughty,” she said. “She is trying to be riffing on drugs and everything, even though she has been dead sober since 1984. She's trying to be the bad girl, and she's still self-identified that way, literally.”

The pieces in exhibition, which nearly span the artist’s entire career — from the 1980s to present day — show her expert and sometimes surprising treatment of paint, including “the drips,” Thatcher said. They are a study in the Japanese philosophy wabi-sabi, which finds beauty in imperfection and impermanence.

“Mary never felt the need to wipe off the drips, because to her, that's accepting the mistakes, the accidental and is part of the beauty of the work,” she said. “That attitude means that the work can seem maybe a little sloppy to some people, maybe a little casual, and I think there are people who have mistaken it for not as serious, but in fact, it's deadly serious what she's doing.”

Up until recently, when she invited a film crew into her studio for the documentary, “Mary Heilmann: Waves, Roads & Hallucinations” in 2023, no one had watched her create.

“She has never, ever had a studio assistant in the room when she paints,” Thatcher said. “None of us have ever seen her make a painting and despite always having assistance — they would get the stretchers made, or stretch the canvas — nobody was allowed in.”

Seeing the film was enlightening, Thatcher said, though Heilmann still sticks to the same policy, even in her older years.

“As she ages and things are not as easy, I said, ‘Would it be helpful if I hired someone to come and be in the studio and maybe get out the paints and the brushes for you?’ And she looked at me like I was a nutjob, because she's like, ‘No,’” Thatcher recalled with a laugh. “It's a very private, solitary process for her.”

In the days before the exhibition opened earlier this month, Heilmann visited the gallery at Guild Hall once her pieces were hung. It was a foreign process for her, to not be intimately involved, Thatcher said, and an exercise in letting go.

“Mary seemed speechless when she first saw it. She was speechless,” Thatcher said. “Even though she’d seen the sketch-up and she knew where things were going, it’s still different to walk into the rooms and see the work. She’s over the moon.”

“Mary Heilmann: Water Ways” will remain on view through October 26 at Guild Hall, 158 Main Street, East Hampton. For more information, visit guildhall.org.