The Life And Work Of Esteban Vincente Is Now On Display At The Parrish Art Museum

The abstract expressionist painter Esteban Vicente would often begin his day with a stroll from his paint-splattered Bridgehampton studio to the Candy Kitchen on Main Street for a newspaper and a cup of coffee. Along that same route, Mr. Vicente would pass the home of Laurie Lambrecht, a young girl who would often watch him as he went. Both were unaware that eventually, their two worlds would collide.

“I remember watching him walk down the street and he wasn’t just on a mission to get the newspaper,” Ms. Lambrecht said in an interview last week. “He was really observing everything, he would stop and look at things, he would look at a tree, watch a squirrel, he was always visually interacting with his environment.”

As the years passed and Ms. Lambrecht discovered her own passion for art, and as her gnawing desire to become a working artist mounted, the stars began to align. Soon, Mr. Vicente would be more than just a curious observer passing beneath trees on her street.

“There came a point in my life that I decided it was time to focus on my dream, which was to live and work as an artist. I decided that the best way to investigate that was to photograph people in the community who were doing exactly that,” she said. “And Bridgehampton is a very small town, everyone knew each other, so being that I lived here for so long, it seemed natural to visit neighbors or artist friends of the family to photograph them. I never felt restricted.”

Fast forward to 1993 and Ms. Lambrecht was commissioned by ARTnews Magazine to photograph Mr. Vicente working in his studio. That collection of photos is now on display, alongside several works by Mr. Vicente, at the Parrish Art Museum’s “Esteban Vicente: Portrait of an Artist” exhibit, which will run through April 10.

Ms. Lambrecht’s photographs offer a glimpse into more than just the artist’s studio, which was filled to the brim with canvas, tools, paints, artwork, flowers, posters and postcards. The images capture the man, who, before his death at the age of 97 in 2001, was considered by many as one of the last surviving members of the first generation of the New York School painters.

In one of the photos on display at the Parrish, Mr. Vicente is seen sitting casually amongst his creations, legs crossed, slightly slouched, reading a newspaper—the gray pages of which are the least colorful thing in the studio. And though he was a high-profile artist, Ms. Lambrecht said that Mr. Vicente’s studio made her feel immediately welcome.

“I wasn’t intimidated by him at all. He and his wife, Harriet, were very welcoming,” she said. “His workspace had such a wonderful, creative almost playful awe to it. It was layered with splattered paints and pigments and papers and notations.” Even the most mundane object was not free from Mr. Vicente’s painterly touch. Metal bandage boxes were used like miniature canvases—the artist would splash thin layers of paint over the box surface, just enough so that the lettering was barely visible beneath.

“The boxes were nailed to the wall and used to hold his pencils,” Ms. Lambrecht explained. “If there was even a coffee can lying on the floor, he would paint that too.”

This willingness to create with any object is also evident in the display of Mr. Vicente’s

divertimientos

—painted blocks of wood mounted on a white wood base.

Reflecting back on her experience photographing Mr. Vicente, Ms. Lambrecht considered the all-encompassing creative process he would undergo for his art.

“There was always color, color everywhere and it flowed from indoors to outdoors and back,” she said. “He would sometimes use a spray gun so even where his canvas ended, the color would continue. I actually never knew what colors the walls inside really were, or the floors for that matter.”

Other photographs in the Parrish collection on display depict the artist removed from his main place of work. The grounds surrounding Mr. Vicente’s Bridgehampton studio were lush and well tended by him and his wife. And as Ms. Lambrecht found, the natural beauty served as a major point of inspiration for the artist.

“He was frequently in his garden, I think he took much pleasure from that,” she said.

One photographic image taken by Ms. Lambrecht shows Mr. Vicente plodding through his garden, grasses and wildflowers high around him, sun shining, and with his back turned to the camera. His neck is craned downward, and though his eyes cannot be seen, it appears that he is in some sort of visual commune with the hundreds of smaller flowers lower to the ground and the nearby underbrush.

Alongside the photographs taken by Ms. Lambrecht, Mr. Vicente’s canvases—large and small—hang. Some are paintings, some are collages of varying materials, but all track the development of the prolific artist, whom Ms. Lambrecht said she was fortunate to know.

“I will be forever grateful for the opportunity to photograph him and I feel the exhibit depicts his work so honestly,” she said. “When you enter the white room of the gallery, you see these paintings that are so much about color and celebration of emotions that colors make, it just seems to be this perfect universe of his creation as well as his inspiration.”

“Esteban Vicente: Portrait of an Artist” will remain on display through April 10 at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton. The exhibit also includes a selection of 25 works on paper by his close artist friends and students, including those by James Brooks, Chuck Close, Susan Crile, Robert De Niro, John Graham, Balcomb Greene, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Ibram Lassaw, Conrad Marca-Relli, Brice Marden, Mercedes Matter, Robert Motherwell, Alfonso Ossorio, Charlotte Park, Ray Parker, Philip Pavia, Jackson Pollock, Dorothea Rockburne, Mark Rothko and Wilfrid Zogbaum, among others.

Admission is $5 and the museum is open Monday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and on Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m. For additional information, visit parrishart.org.