At Home With Adler And Beegan

When artist Carolyn Beegan moved into her historic Sag Harbor home 11 years ago, she modeled the living room after the American Hotel on Main Street, capturing the look of a cozy smoking parlor oozing with a British Colonial essence.

Little did she know that years later, this particular room would bring her memory back to the night she met her present-day fiancée: abstract expressionist Andrew Adler.

It was a cold winter night in 2009. Mr. Adler was at the American Hotel bar with a couple of friends when he noticed Ms. Beegan. But he was too shy to say hello.

Two days later, he saw her again.

“We were having another drink at the hotel, and I walked straight up to her, which I never do, and invited her to sit down with us,” Mr. Adler said during a recent interview at the couple’s home. “And then we just talked. All evening.”

“I was only there two nights later because of the snowstorm,” Ms. Beegan piped in, lounging on a chaise in the living room. “It’s not like I was always sitting in that seat, wearing the same sweater.”

“I was wearing the same sweater, too!” Mr. Adler said.

“You were!” Ms. Beegan recalled with a laugh. “It’s almost like we had a retake. We blew it the first time, and then we had a second chance.”

Under the falling snow, Mr. Adler walked Ms. Beegan home later that evening. He kissed her good night, and not long after, moved into her circa-1790 house on Union Street—fortifying their relationship and kick starting an artistic partnership.

The couple transformed the attic into a computer studio, leaving the painting to their workspace just up the road on Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike. Their combined style is a hybrid between digital imaging and abstract expressionism, Ms. Beegan explained.

“It was Andrew’s idea to work together,” she said.

“I was trying to keep her attention,” Mr. Adler said.

Ms. Beegan smiled, playfully shaking her head of thick red hair. Mr. Adler first grabbed her attention as an individual artist, she said, gesturing to some of his artwork around the room, including a bust on the floor and an abstract painting of calla lilies. One of her nude drawings hangs adjacent, across the way from a collection of her early oil paintings.

Small pieces of artwork on the walls tease at their travels together and separate backgrounds, as does their new collaboration. And though Ms. Beegan was there first, the house now reflects both artists, the couple said.

“I loved the character—the wide-planked floors, the moldings,” Ms. Beegan said. “It just had a lot of charm.”

“I like old houses,” Mr. Adler added. “I lived in a 550-year-old house in the south of France.”

“So he has a thing for age and charm, too,” Ms. Beegan said.

Though nearly half of Mr. Adler’s years have been spent overseas, he is no stranger to the East End. Artistic from a young age, he summered in Southampton with his father, Richard Adler, a Tony Award-winning Broadway songwriter.

“I grew up in a particular atmosphere with very well-known people around me who were very driven, ambitious and all about career,” Mr. Adler said. “And I saw that they weren’t necessarily the happiest people. But I was always painting for me. I knew it was an expression and a communication, and I wanted people to see it.”

After graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1973, all Mr. Adler knew was that he wanted to explore his art. So he moved back to the Hamptons, where he worked as an assistant to abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning until 1975.

“That was the height of my artistic education,” Mr. Adler said. “He was a real laid-back guy, but just being around him was very intense. He’d come by my studio and give me sort of critiques, in his way. And the anecdotes he had, he was very rich with experience.”

Driven to gain his own life experiences, Mr. Adler left his father and de Kooning behind at age 23 for Europe. He didn’t return to the United States for three decades.

“I’d never taken advantage of America, culturally,” he said. “I always had shows and kept in touch, but I felt like I was totally isolated in the south of France. It was sort of like a dead end for me, in Europe. Even though I was showing, I felt it was time to spend some time in America. So I came back.”

Ms. Beegan wasn’t encouraged to pursue her artistic ambitions during her childhood, she said. It was merely employed as a distraction mechanism by her mother during Mass services at church, she recalled.

“She’d give me a pen and paper to shut me up,” she said. “So I always drew and loved drawing, but as Irish immigrants, my parents discouraged me from going to art school, which is what I really wanted to do. Not out of any kind of meanness, but they didn’t think it was very practical. They saw painting as more of a hobby than a career.”

Ultimately, Ms. Beegan became a systems analyst in the oil industry, she said, and hated it with a passion.

“I finally quit just to paint full time,” she said. “The whole time that I worked, I’d take art classes on the side. My father goofs around that I retired at 26.”

Mr. Adler interrupted. “Well, we have another similarity that I didn’t realize.”

“What’s that?,” Ms. Beegan asked.

“Since you were painting in the church, it was that religious impulse. It must have been an influence,” Mr. Adler said.

“Yes, of course,” his fiancée replied.

“And I got a degree in comparative religions, which I do incorporate into my work,” Mr. Adler said.

Religion is a theme that the couple finds in their work together, as well as their travels, where they gather photographs of local scenes and each other. To begin a piece, Ms. Beegan collages and manipulates two or more photographs together in Adobe Photoshop. The composition is printed out, small format, and is then enhanced by hand using a combination of oil paint, acrylic, charcoal, ink and wax.

When the couple is satisfied, the image is scanned back into Photoshop and further manipulated. The final composition is printed large format, typically on canvas, and finalized by hand.

At their studio, Ms. Beegan said the first piece they worked on together took a year, but since then, the journey has smoothed out. The couple has a rhythm, and can usually finish in about four months.

“How do we know we’re done? Well, what did Jackson Pollock once say?” Ms. Beegan said, looking at her fiancée. “‘How do you know when you’re done making love?’”

The couple laughed.

“This is a new entity,” Mr. Adler said, referring to their artistic partnership. “We’re treating it like it’s a third person. It’s not us. My work is not her work. We’re known individually, but this is something new because it’s only been born just over two years ago. It’s like someone coming out of art school. So the work is like a 23-year-old, which I still feel like.”

They walked out of the studio, closing the doors behind them. While they haven’t set a wedding date, 45-year-old Ms. Beegan said they’ll be married before Mr. Adler turns 60 next year.

As a couple, and collaborative artists, they’re just getting started.

“The work is really about us, our experience together,” Mr. Adler said. “And our expression as a couple and our love. And all that happens is not always the idealistic side. We’re not 20 years old anymore. There are pictures of us in it. It’s very aesthetic oriented, but in a mature sort of way.”