Where Art and Community Flourish: At Home With Eva Faye and Abby Terkuhle

Eva Faye and Abby Terkuhle have gathered about a dozen friends and neighbors at their home on Lumber Lane in Bridgehampton to join them for an experiment they called “Salon des Artistes.”

Faye, an artist, has opened her painting studio to visitors and invited poet Grace Schulman to read her poetry under a wisteria-covered pergola on an August afternoon.

The smell of fresh basil wafted in the air from large terracotta pots. Platters of fruit and cheese were set on a table, against the backdrop of a Southern magnolia tree, a gift from a friend for Faye’s 40th birthday, 27 years ago. “Now you know how old I am,” she said.

Meanwhile, Terkuhle made sure guests — most walked to the impromptu salon — were hydrated, in one way or another. They had all grown close about five years ago. Carmine Gibaldi, a psychology professor, started waving to the couple while out walking his dog, soon bonding with them and other guests, including artists Dianne Blell, Candace Hill-Montgomery and Laurie Lambrecht, during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

At that time, the couple called their outdoor space “the Bistro.” Clearly, they missed the get-togethers and decided to rebrand.

On a coffee table inside the studio, the 2025 book “Light Sand and Sea: Hamptons Artists and their Studios,” is open to Faye’s portrait. The couple’s beagle, Charlie, sits on her lap.

What may be works-in-progress hang over a drop cloth, saturated with red. Her “Blue Series” hangs over a couch. They had recently made a trip to Faye’s home country, Norway, for a show in Trondheim.

“It’s ultramarine blue — a deep color, but it has a lot of light to it,” she said. “It’s very luminous, if it dries the way I want it to.”

Faye stretches her own linen, seals it with rabbit skin glue and places the blank canvas on the floor. She pours oil paints and paints in thin layers, incorporating stencils. A lot of trial and error is involved.

“I’m really interested in color in combination with pattern and light,” she said. “When it works, I know it — and when it doesn’t, I know it.”

The artist grew up outside of Oslo, the daughter of an opera singer mother and an office manager father. “I could put my skis on and ski right into a huge forest,” she said. “We were surrounded by nature.”

Her family had vacation homes in the mountains as well as along the coast.

“There was lots of sunshine and the waters were swimmable because of the Gulf Stream. We feel like there was some connection there,” she said, noting that the Gulf Stream originates in the Gulf of Mexico, close to where Terkuhle grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Although Faye paints an idyllic picture of her childhood, she couldn’t wait to follow her older sister to Paris. She studied at the Académie Julian, a traditional French art school, before transferring to Parsons School of Design and finishing her last year in Manhattan in 1982. She went on to get her Master of Fine Arts degree from Hunter College, where her teachers included Jack Youngerman and Vincent Longo.

In addition to the color field paintings of her teachers, she was influenced by the Neo-Expressionism that was exploding out of Lower Manhattan at the time, exemplified by Julian Schnabel and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

“The movement was sensual, a reaction to minimalism, and had an openness about using the figure in an expressionistic way,” she said. “It was an interesting time to live in SoHo.”

Faye and Terkuhle met in SoHo at a party after a gallery show in 1984. “We saw each other across a crowded room,” she said. “We’re both tall. That probably helped.”

Terkuhle was working as a producer at Showtime and Faye soon moved into his narrow railroad apartment on Prince Street. Two years after they met, the couple married at an intimate inn in the Catskills. “Immigration came after me,” Faye said. “My visa expired.”

Thankfully, their love never did. Terkuhle took his bride out east where she fell in love all over again. They rented in the summers, including a home across from Town Pond in East Hampton, where the Gardiner Mill Cottage Gallery is located today.

“A bar was set up in the windmill,” recalled Terkuhle, whose father is Dutch. “Of course, we wanted to live there.”

The couple first rented year-round on Maple Street in Bridgehampton, very close to where they live today. Their daughter, Isabelle, was born in 1994 and, three years later, they bought their circa-1903 Queen Anne. They moved in full time in 2018, trading their Tribeca apartment for a pied-à-terre on the Upper East Side.

Entering their home from the back, an informal dining room has floor-to-ceiling windows that open onto the expansive yard and views of a large red maple tree.

The room also houses one of Terkuhle’s prized possessions: a Gimbal lamp originally used on whaling ships. “They put whale oil in the center here,” he said, taking the metal sphere off its wooden pedestal.

Terkuhle grew up in New Orleans with two older sisters, who were tortured by his love of snakes. His mother was a homemaker, who wrote poetry and loved antiquing. His father was the marketing director for Curtis & Davis, a modernist architecture firm.

“My father was always making home movies,” Terkuhle said. “He taught me how to edit 8 mm and Super 8 film, and started my fascination with motion pictures. He was also a great photographer.”

He went on to study communications at Loyola University and took up photojournalism. “I shot James Booker’s first album cover,” he said of the critically acclaimed 1976 “Junco Partners.”

The production company he worked for in New Orleans also had an office in New York, so Terkuhle made his way there. He scored a gig as a segment producer for Saturday Night Live before going on to interview for a job at MTV in 1986.

He had never managed a creative staff before and was worried. “Oh, don’t even try. You can’t manage them,” Terkuhle recalled the interviewer told him. “Have fun.”

And have fun he did. He started out as director of on-air promotion, producing animated MTV logos — “all the things that made it fun to watch between videos,” he said.

“It was alive, ever-changing and had a wink,” he said, “a sense of humor.”

From producing 10-second promos, he went on to executive-produce the three longest-running animated shows on MTV, including “Beavis and Butt-Head,” “Daria” and “Celebrity Deathmatch,” and became president of MTV Animation.

He built a writing staff and, for seven seasons, worked alongside Mike Judge, who created, drew and voiced both of the tween characters, Beavis and Butt-Head. “Mike really brought them to life. I knew people like that in New Orleans,” he said. “It was silly, but smart. It made me laugh.”

MTV audiences ate it up. In 1996, Terkuhle produced “Beavis and Butt-Head Do America,” MTV’s first animated feature film and the equally radical spinoff “Daria.”

The stop-motion Claymation show “Celebrity Deathmatch” followed, prompting Steven Spielberg to write Terkuhle a letter regarding the episode pitting him against Hitchcock. “I want a rematch,” he wrote.

Today, Terkuhle runs production company Category 5 Media with a partner, and has returned to fine art photography, using Instagram as his platform.

The couple hasn’t been back to New Orleans in a few years, but the spirit of Carnival is never far behind. Masks, skulls, snakes, tortoises and other swamp creatures play a big role in the decor. A nutria tooth necklace hangs on a door.

Still, the home could not be cozier. The most charming part of the house is the tiny writer’s room, which faces Lumber Lane — perfect for poetry.

The hope is that there will be more salons to come. In the meantime, along with artists and neighbors Blell, Hill-Montgomery and Lambrecht, Faye is part of this year’s “Student Art Festival: Rauschenberg100,” opening at Guild Hall in East Hampton on November 15.

As such, she inspired fourth-graders at Springs School to make art. “They’re naturals,” she said.