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Sometimes serendipity or just plain good luck kicks in at the 11th hour.
Truth be told, I was late in submitting an artist’s profile for the big Labor Day issue of The Press.
My sage and ever-benevolent editor had asked me to submit an article for “The Roaming Docent” on Friday—but by Monday at noon, I still didn’t have an artist lined up.
The artist of my choice, Pamela Ornstein, had been someone I wanted to cover for quite a while. Pamela was a star student of Paton Miller, but, alas, this time she was away on holiday, which would sink any chance I had for conducting a proper interview. But as luck would have it (there’s that word again) I already had a good amount of information about her from a previous interview. I was also very familiar with her art. So that’s two out of three! The third part was the in-person view of her art. That’s the most important component of any artist profile. Early Monday afternoon, Pamela had returned my call and to my pleasure and relief, she provided me with access to her studio on Peconic Bay while she was away.
This changed the entire thrust of the article. This was the “serendipity” I spoke of.
Ms. Ornstein’s housekeeper had been alerted to my visit. I arrived in one of the most inviting and visually stimulating art studios in the Hamptons. Located on the south side of her extremely beautiful home, her studio is an entire sunlit wing that she had built onto her house designed for both painting, her jewelry design and writing—the type of perfect artist’s studio that you read about in novels and one that most artists simply dream of having. Filled with paintings, beautiful furniture, stacked books on every subject, skylights with dappled sunlight spilling onto the wood floors, sculptures, an antique fainting couch draped in a beautiful fabric, artists easels and tubes of paint and brushes everywhere. This is the studio of an active, prolific working artist that absolutely needs and loves to paint. I regarded the studio and all her work alone and in silence, unfettered as if I was in a museum or a gallery. For an artist’s “interview,” this was a most unusual but fascinating situation.
The most astonishing thing about this studio visit was that it was totally unanticipated by either of us.
Yet the studio itself was in perfect and artful working disarray. It was a haven of serene and delightful artistry and evidence of both a creative and disciplined mind. This was no common work studio for oil painting. This place spoke of a sophisticated, highly intelligent and worldly artist who apparently travels extensively and passionately paints every corner of it. I have to admit, my head was spinning a bit by the sheer range of painted subjects I saw on easels, stacked, leaning and hanging on the walls.
This range made it impossible for me to pin Pamela down as an artist, as she is one of the freest artistic souls with a brush you’ll ever meet. She was schooled by Southampton’s most notable artist and art instructor, Paton Miller, where she was a student, but not an acolyte. In eight short years of painting, she developed her own palette, brush technique and clear, emotional approach. She paints as she enjoys her subjects. Painting for herself means she is never burdened with the expected demands of being “avant-garde” or “gallery/edgy.”
Nature, in all its forms, looms largely in her portfolio. Animals of all kinds are seen in every kind of setting. I get the clear impression that she couldn’t care less for painting trends or popular styles. Her trips to Africa , Greece, Chile, Iceland, Germany and St. Martin yield a stunning variety of painted subjects. Pamela will paint all manner of animals that are, in their true nature, portraits. I saw endearing domestic pets to elephants in the wild in Jackelberry, Africa. Crows in full series, otters, pigeons, dogs, deer, swans, zebra and horses all make appearances in her studio menagerie.
What became so plainly evident and remarkably unique about Pamela’s work is how much she cares about her subjects. Each subject in every painting is treated with both true fascination and love. The reason why she paints now becomes plainly evident: The canvas. The paint. The techniques. All are simply vehicles, not end products for their own sake. Maybe some would differ with my opinion here, but that is probably the singular reason her work is so successful. That is also the reason she can paint such a variety of subjects and in so many free and different styles.
There’s genuine personal enjoyment going on here—and Ms. Ornstein wants to share it. As example: “It’s Fun to Be Fast” features a stylish gentleman in a white summer suit riding a penny-farthing—an antique bicycle with that large wheel in the front. It’s a colorful and graphic painting. Ostensibly, it feels like an antique, European poster but her modern sensibility and clean graphic design lend it a crisp, contemporary feeling.
However, the works that I found so sublime and dramatic are her landscape “portraits.” I call them portraits because many of them feature a bold, mountainous shape dominating the area of canvas and painted in color and value that creates a strong, singular presence on the canvas.
“Nepeague,” oil on linen, is a jewel of a landscape painting. The land lush with tactile vegetation supports a mountainous bluff that bisects the canvas horizontally and almost in half. The sky has sensual and pale brush strokes where the clouds are merely suggested but yet clearly defined. Ms. Ornstein’s palette here is, to put it simply, beautiful. Shades of cadmium and chrome oxide green softened with black create both depth and an atmospheric perspective that supports her main subject, the dominant sand covered bluff. A small tree, almost directly in the center of the painting violates the geometry of the painting in a delightful way. Created with quick and perfectly efficient strokes of a loaded brush, the tree adds almost a comic relief to the stoic subject of the painting.
Ms. Ornstein’s “Crow” portraits earn high marks not only for their rich, painterly quality but also for the variety in which each is painted with such distinct personalities. It’s as if each did a sitting for her. And in this magical studio, I could almost believe that it happened.
However, there is clearly an abstract approach entering her work and it is here, in the abstract, that I find Ms. Ornstein’s most powerful direction and vision.
Her large work “Frozen Motion” shows a highly abstracted landscape, possibly an antique structure, that is broken down into sharp edged, boxes and rectangles—each overlapping the other to create depth and dimension. The foreground features the largest shapes and gradually recedes to smaller shapes as the distance increases. This work stands out as a virtual tour de force in her studio collection.
I don’t know if Pamela views herself as an abstract painter but, if she did, this is a style that is absolutely natural to her and lends her work the most artistic gravity.
However, I still can’t help but be brought back to the variety of styles in which she paints. It’s important know that this is not a fishing expedition whereby she’s searching for a style that she can eventually hang her hat on for all her future works—as in a signature style. No. Rather, the variety of styles, brush strokes and renderings are Ms. Ornstein’s voice.
As example, one can’t help but be completely startled by her “Zebra Crossing in Patagonia.” Here we have a masterfully rendered female zebra with all of its musculature perfectly drawn and painted in a quite realistic way. But it’s set against a mountainous location that is painted in an evocative, but most surprisingly impressionistic, style.
This juxtaposition is startling until you realize that the location is painted as accurately and as realistically as the zebra. That must have been the way it looked en plein air.
Ms. Ornstein will never stop painting. She’s on a quest and she found her one and most successful vehicle: paint on canvas.
Her works can often be seen exhibited throughout the area. For more information, visit pamelaornsteinpaintings.com.
on Aug 28, 2018