Spanierman Gallery, LLC, at East Hampton is pleased to announce the opening on June 4, 2009 of Four East End Artists, featuring the work of Carol Hunt, Fulvio Massi, Betty Parsons, and William Rayner.  An opening reception will be held on June 6 from 6 to 8 pm.

 Artists have lived and worked on eastern Long Island since the mid-nineteenth century, and like their predecessors the four in this exhibition have drawn inspiration from the area’s distinctive light and coastal landscape.  Yet, in their work, the artists each found a different means of responding to their surroundings.  The senior member of the group, and the best known, is Betty Parsons (1900-1982), who began to work on Long Island after an unexpected inheritance, received in 1959, enabled her to purchase land on a cliff overlooking the sea in Southold.  By then, her reputation as an art dealer with a rare perspicacity was firmly established, as she had given shows to avant-garde artists including Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still long before others had recognized their importance.  However, she was also a dedicated artist in her own right.  Having studied art since she was young, she continued to paint and sculpt throughout her life.  During her years in Southold, she produced constructions from the wood scraps she found on the beach, painting and combining them into new structures that often evoke anthropomorphic associations.  She also created abstract paintings in which she drew from the methods of the Abstract Expressionists whose work she exhibited, but also used color and shape to express her own responses to natural and cosmological phenomena. 

Parsons encouraged artists to find their own voices, among them, her nephew William Rayner, whom she mentored.  A travel writer who worked mostly for Condé Nast publications, Rayner is a watercolorist.  He captures his surroundings with vivid translucency. The brilliancy of his work is enhanced by his frequent practice of leaving areas of his white paper exposed, which sets his forms into relief.  Fulvio Massi, who was born in Trieste, Italy, and now lives in Bridgehampton, creates paintings in which he builds his surfaces with a myriad of drawn, overlapping, curvilinear lines and spare areas of subtle color.   A native of Berkeley, California, who lives in Southampton, Carol Hunt relies on color and gesture to produce openly expressive paintings filled with bold strokes that are dynamically interactive.  Her images evoke fleeting visual thoughts jotted down for later analysis.  In its diversity and energy, the work of the four artists in this exhibition expresses the generative creativity and the freeing atmosphere that have long characterized the art of Long Island’s East End.