terryelkins

Caswell Cliffs, oil on linen, 3'x11' Working outside is kind of like therapy for me. I can escape from everything about the day or the world that bothers me, at least for a little while. Sometimes painting is really just an excuse for being there, at a place, in the moment. Montauk is especially that way. It’s a 25 mile drive from my studio to Montauk Point thru sometimes slow moving traffic, crazy people on the highway, people not paying attention, tailgating or going to damn slow, some that only drive on the weekends and forget about paying ... [Read more]

The population swells from Memorial Day to Labor Day as the summer people and tourists flood in by car, limousine, motorcycle, helicopter, jet, train, boat, bicycle, backpack. It’s already bad every weekday morning and afternoon as the trade parade flows in and out for work. Full time residents complain about the traffic. They jockey for position on Highway 27, the main artery, with Maserati’s and luxury Range Rovers or for a parking space in the parking lot at the Commons or while waiting in the check out line at the grocery store or their favorite restaurant. Some people take up ... [Read more]

Montauk Point Lighthouse,pencil on collage, 30"x24", private collection In the summer of 2000 I was drawing the lighthouse from the parking lot at Montauk Point, a great view to set up and work. I’d gotten used to working on location, dealing with wind, rain or blistering sun and people coming over to watch and ask intuitive or sometimes simply dumb questions like, "Are you painting?" I've been working outside painting for a few years, dragging my folding easel and paints around with me wherever I’d go. A friend from Texas, Jim Gingrich got me interested. It’s something I ... [Read more]

Double Dories, oil painting on collage, 44"x77" I found an old set of nautical charts in my studio when I moved in. I pinned the charts on the wall and noticed how they connected from Eastern Long Island to Cape Cod. It wasn't long before I began to use them in my work, at first drawing simple nautical images over the chart. The I started taking a chart, making a collage and reformatting the area I wanted to draw on, tearing off the borders, laying them out to the size I wanted, making a smaller chart that would ... [Read more]

1988, right after I moved into my studio. By the summer of '88 I had moved into my new studio and life seemed to be on the right track. After nearly ten years of going back and forth from Texas to New York, working odd jobs, getting let go, going home with my tail between my legs, groveling up to my old boss, to my old job working for an art handler in Houston, saving my money and going back to NYC, I’d found my own place on the East End and could finally settle in. I had ... [Read more]

In the late summer and fall the shoreline around the East End is abundant with Stripped Bass and Bluefish. Surf casting is as easy as throwing out a line. If I was fishing at Town Line Road it was no fluke to reel in two fish on one lure. The first sign of a school are seagulls working the water’s surface. They're dipping down to pick up scraps churned up by the feeding frenzy going on just below the surface. A school can move closer to shore, running the baitfish in that are literally jumping onto the beach to escape. ... [Read more]

Around the turn of the century when this area was a quiet retreat from the city, where artists like Thomas Moran, William Merritt Chase and Childe Hassam lived and worked, long before the developers showed up, the small town of Bridgehampton and it’s surrounding landscape was a rural farming community. By the 1930s and 40s Long Island had become the bread basket of the East Coast. Local farms produced some of the finest potatoes in the rich soil left behind from the Wisconsinan glacial age, on what is now Long Island. Potatoes were harvested, brought to larger facilities where they were ... [Read more]

The last time I saw Dina, 2012 I first visited East Hampton in the early 1980s with a girlfriend, singer actress Christine Andreas, from NYC. I was living and working part time in a loft in SoHo at the corner of Broadway and Broome St, working for artist John Alexander when I met Christine. Christine was in the original Broadway cast of Oklahoma and could sing as well as anyone on the planet, seriously! She was giving a performance that summer of “Songs by Sondheim” at Guild Hall of East Hampton and asked if I wanted to come out ... [Read more]

Sunrise on the East End E a s t   E n d   S t o r i e s East End Stories is an online retrospective show accompanied by a narrative blog, a journal recounting my impressions of moving to Eastern Long Island thirty years ago this summer. The stories are written as entries and the paintings are in the gallery section of the site. It chronicles my experiences and the artwork I made just before and after I moved here. Many of the works in the show chronicle the changes I've witnessed to the East End, before ... [Read more]