Art World
Wet Paint in the Wild: Daniel Heidkamp Displays His Plein Air Paintings in the Hamptons
The artist takes us through a week in his life.
Daniel Heidkamp
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Welcome to Wet Paint in the Wild, the freewheeling—and free!—spinoff of Artnet News Pro’s beloved Wet Paint gossip column, where we give art-world insiders a disposable camera to chronicle their lives on the circuit. To read the latest Wet Paint column, click here (members only).
It’s the dog days of summer, and most wise New Yorkers have found a reason to be out East. For painter Daniel Heidkamp, that meant opening up a pop-up show at Montauk’s Fort Pond House, a mixed-use space in a public park right across from the beloved Surf Lodge. I’ve long been a fan of Heidkamp’s bucolic landscape paintings (he painted all of the ones in this show en plein air, and it shows), and in lieu of making it out there to see the show myself, I sent him with a disposable camera to capture the scene in the Hamptons this year. Take it away, Daniel!
In this photo, Half Gallery director Erin Goldberger and I peek through the front windows of the Fort Pond House at the start of the event.
My first stop on the drive was the Big Duck in Flanders, NY. This duck was originally constructed in 1931 as a place to sell duck eggs and has since been added to the National Register of Historic Places. According to writer and summer resident of Long Island George Plimpton, “The Big Duck was important because it was the landmark that meant New York City was far behind and we were almost home.”
Next we started to fuel up on the art vibes at the Springs General Store. Originally opened in 1844, this is where local artist Jackson Pollock famously traded his drip paintings for groceries. The store is currently shuttered, but the pumps remain as relics of a different time.
Speaking of Pollock, his distinctive studio is located just up the street in Springs, and his equally unique gravesite is at the nearby Green River Cemetery. Here the resting places of both Pollock and his wife, the wonderful painter Lee Krasner, are marked by various size boulders and now decorated shrine-like with pebbles and a porcelain poodle.
On the theme of abstract painters, my travels next took me to the Parrish Art Museum to see Eddie Martinez’s current exhibition. Like me, Eddie spent some formative early years in the Boston area, and it has been inspiring to see this friend and colleague climb to great heights including being part of this year’s Venice Biennale . While I didn’t get to Italy to see that show, it was great to catch this current batch of large colorful ‘butterfly paintings’ closer to home.
By Sunset I arrived in Montauk and was able to catch the fading light casting colors on the harbor boats near Star Island.
In the morning Bill Powers from Half Gallery showed up and we drove out to the pier at Navy Beach. Bill likes this spot because it reminds him of the anxiety-inducing bridge in the painting ‘The Scream.’ While Bill seems pretty relaxed in this picture, perhaps it’s the Mark Grotjahn mask on his sweatshirt that fills in for Munch’s shrieking figure.
It was a red hot weekend and I decided to take my sketch book to the rocky beach at Hero State Park.
On my walk along the shore I spotted this blue tent that looked to me like an updated version of Winslow Homer’s 1874 Hamptons painting ‘The Tent (Summer by the Sea).” Homer is known to have painted a number of canvases in the area but all in the years before this site was nicknamed ‘Radars’ by surfers because of the eerie abandoned radar tower perched high above the cliff.
This is also where you can see some of the most gnarled and striated cliff formations sometimes called hoodoos and thought to possess bewitching spirits. I set myself up on a rock next to a horseshoe crab with the Montauk Point Lighthouse looming in the distance. The entire scene took on a surreal aura.
On Friday night we checked out the opening at Galerie Sardine, a new project space in Amagansett started by painter Joe Bradley and his wife Valentina Akerman. The exhibition featured glass works by Dana Yolanda and paintings by Janice Nowinski. The cozy reception felt like a garden party. In attendance were NYC and Hamptons art luminaries like David Salle, Stanley Whitney, and Elizabeth Hazan, daughter of famous east end painter Jane Freilicher.
Joe Bradley at Galerie Sardine.
Saturday morning I woke up bright and early and visited the Fort Pond House. There was some time before that evening’s opening so I decided to set up the easel and make an ‘en plein air’ painting of the beautiful surroundings. The house which is owned by the town of East Hampton, is tucked away at the edge of the pond, so I had many quiet hours to paint, kept company by only the chirping warblers and a white-tail deer leaping by.
Time to install the show! Per house regulations we could not put any nails into the walls so we staged all the work on the porch outside and applied some ‘museum putty’ to the stretcher bars. Despite the hot humid air all the paintings happily stayed suspended for the duration.
Once the paintings were hung and the sunflowers were in place, the opening kicked off.
Here Gallery Director Erin Goldberger chats it up with distinguished art advisor Wendy Cromwell.
While Bill points out some important details to exhibition attendees.
Gallerists Adam Lindemann and his wife Amalia Dayan were in attendance, accompanied by the artists Peter and Sally Saul who both exhibit work at Lindemann’s Venus over Manhattan. Adam and I discussed the history of auto racing in the Hamptons in reference to my painting ‘The Bridge’ which depicts the former racetrack, now a golf course.
Here is a shot of me hanging out in front of the Fort Pond house with artist Brent Richardson, Erin Goldberger and Kate Messinger, while the children of artist Michael Kagan play in the Montauk twilight.
Artist Lucien Smith and gallerist Max Levai (owner of The Ranch) visited the show.
Max invited me out to The Ranch, so the next morning I popped over to the art space housed on the site of the oldest cattle ranch in America, the current exhibition includes Donna Dennis’s Deep Station which is a miniature replica of a New York subway station.
And Elroy Turnbull of the Ranch shows me the large scale garden installation growing alongside the horse stables.
As the weekend drew to an end I took one more walk along the cliffs above the Montauk beaches, with the historic ‘seven sisters’ houses off in the distance and surfers looking for the perfect wave, I felt like I was back inside my painting of Ditch Plains.
And then it was time to blast off, on the way out of town I had a look at the twist of skid marks along Napeague Meadow Road looking like abstract brushstrokes with the massive radio tower in the distance, Next stop NYC.
