How does a 27-year-old who just five years ago had relatively few connections to the East End art community wind up opening a show last weekend at his Montauk gallery with works by 121 local artists and a jam-packed crowd?
That’s the somewhat unlikely story of Christopher Lucore, who splits his time between making art and showing it.
While he was born and raised in Springfield, Ill., his parents had more East Coast ties. His mother grew up in Rockville Centre, his father in Connecticut, and when he was 2 years old they bought a house in Montauk. “Any time we were off school in Springfield, we were out here,” he said during a conversation at the Lucore Art Gallery.
The art thing started early. “I was the little brother, the youngest of three, so I was sort of a destructive force in my early years. Being able to sit down with some colored markers and a sheet of paper was a great way for me not to destroy anything for two or three hours. My parents definitely encouraged that.”
His parents also love and collect art, and they took him to galleries and museums when he was little. “My mom was the type to walk through a museum and read everything, so I would look at everything. One of my dad’s favorite artists is Dan Christensen,” a highly regarded painter who lived in Springs. “He’s probably my biggest inspiration.”
And then there’s Anne Raymond, another East Hampton artist known for her large atmospheric abstract paintings. “I was in her studio making monotypes when I was 8 or 9 years old. I was a little dripper at the Pollock-Krasner House.” Ms. Raymond later became a mentor.
“I looked at art as something that would always be in my life, but I didn’t know if it was something I could follow as an academic or professional pursuit,” Mr. Lucore said. When he went off to Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, N.Y., his focus at first was chemistry and math. Within two weeks he quit math and took up studio art, and spent the rest of his college years studying chemistry and art.
“I was in school, and I wanted to be learning and engaging with things that challenged me.” That was chemistry, focusing largely on organic chemistry and molecular synthesis, “so the natural career path for me would have been maybe, drug development.”
He never studied biochemistry, however, “and if you’re going to do drug development you have to know what the thing you make is going to do when it gets into a human body. There seemed to be a lot of potential to screw things up. With chemistry there is always a right answer. With art, there was no right answer. I got to make the answers.”
Asked about his painting while in college, he said it has always been very colorful — “full rainbow” — with plenty of hard-edged geometric forms. It was always abstract, he said — even his still-life assignments had abstract qualities. “I would draw the things on the table, but maybe they would be hanging from a platform on chains that didn’t connect to anything.”
If you scroll to the end of his Instagram, it leads to the work he was creating during his freshman year in college. Even then there were overlapping forms and layers that are still characteristic of his work. During Covid, some of his abstract shapes resembled the coronavirus. From the beginning he has moved among different styles, rather than following a straight path. Speaking of Covid and college, Mr. Lucore graduated during the pandemic at the same time as his parents sold the house in Springfield and moved to Montauk.
One day while driving west through East Hampton, he had a grand mal seizure. “I don’t remember anything past the school in Amagansett.” When he got to Woods Lane, he flew through the red light and ran into a truck.
“No damage to the truck, totaled my car, woke up in the hospital, no damage to my body. Everything went wrong and somehow everything went right.” There were several subsequent seizures, but he now has his illness under control with medication.
That first year after college, “I didn’t have a job, I couldn’t go anywhere. It was the pandemic, and my parents were watching me like a couple of hawks. To fill my time I really got serious about painting.” He started working on canvas with thick acrylic textures and began to meet with Ms. Raymond. “I would make paintings, show them to Anne, get feedback, then make another painting.”
Because of the seizures, Mr. Lucore no longer has a driver’s license. One day, while riding with his parents to get coffee in downtown Montauk, they passed a defunct art gallery. “I said, what if I opened a gallery? My parents were thrilled.”
“For me, with Montauk always being a second location, I never really felt I had that connection here. I didn’t have a social network or a lot of friends, so my gallery was like my foot in the door to become part of the town.” As soon as the gallery opened he got in touch with the Depot Gallery, which is the outlet for the Montauk Artists Association.
Because the gallery space is also the artist’s studio, he has to juggle between the two. “With the gallery, you have to organize everything, hang everything, measure, but there’s a bleed-over, too. It’s also inspiration, learning more about the art scene, which inspires me as an artist.”
Over the past several years, Mr. Lucore has begun moving between small and medium-size works and increasingly large canvases, some as long as 16 feet, which he has to roll out on the gallery floor before starting work. He recently shifted from painting circles to what he calls “interlocking blobs,” closed irregular forms that overlap and interlock as they spread horizontally across the canvas.
The blobs have evolved into “knot” pieces, mazelike forms with lines running over and under other lines that encourage the viewer to read or follow the pattern.
Asked how he figures out the complex paths, he said, “Sometimes I just close my eyes and make a one-line pencil scribble around the canvas. Then from there you can widen it out and refine the width and where it goes and decide what crosses over what, and then it’s just layers of paint.” He has recently begun to use glow-in-the-dark paint as the ground for the smaller knot pieces.
Mr. Lucore was one of the organizers, along with the Montauk Chamber of Commerce and the Montauk Artists Association, of the hamlet’s recent Art Walk, which showcased artworks in the windows of shuttered storefronts. The walk concluded with the opening at the Lucore Gallery.
He can hang art very quickly, and offered his services, for free, to the Depot Gallery, James Katsipis’s gallery, and Dalton Portella’s 484 Gallery. “Donna [Corvi] will get all the work in at the Depot, give me a call, and I’ll pull up and hang it in two hours.”
“It’s all about what can you do for your community,”
The key, he said, is spatial distribution. “It’s beyond one piece — it’s how does the piece talk with the pieces next to it and the ones around it. With all the math I did in school, that stuff comes to me naturally.”
