Club music thumped through the air at the Montauk Beach House as attendees milled around the room at Sam Busiello's art opening, gazing at paintings of layered colors and textures as well as sarongs, pouches, and bikinis made of similarly colorful and energetic patterns.
Bold greens sit next to pinks and blues. Rectangles of orange cover splotches of yellow and purple. No painting is like another.
The initial step in her artistic process is very tactile. In her studio in Sag Harbor, she lays out up to 40 canvases at a time. Then, she builds up layers of brightly colored acrylic and oil paint before adding other objects — CDs, glitter, party string, even fishing materials.
She then scans those paintings, takes elements from each scan, and pairs them together before finally printing those digital creations onto fabric. The prints she uses for her fabric are made up of hundreds of digital layers.
Many of the paintings in the show at the Beach House highlight her merging of the natural and the abstract. Several paintings have abstract backgrounds with more realistic animals — butterflies, birds — laid atop, and even some of the totally abstract paintings carry the weight of a lively summer day.
The show also features hand-drawn graphite pieces, showcasing wildlife she has encountered in Sag Harbor. She also uses those images for her fabrics, creating pillows.
Turning her art into clothing is just another layer of her work. She remembers that, at the age of 8, she used the website Custom Ink to design T-shirts covered in rainbow peace signs.
She graduated from the Ross School in 2012, attended the Pratt Institute in New York City, and returned to the South Fork after graduating in 2016.
In an early foray into clothing design, she used the images in her paintings to create textiles that became leggings, which she sold at Satori, a Sag Harbor boutique.
During the Covid pandemic, Busiello, along with Greta Kroessler, a friend from Pratt, made masks and bucket hats, also using fabric printed with her designs.
She began to expand to other products — bikinis, sarongs, mesh tops, slip dresses, scrunchies. Later, during another stretch of time when she was stuck at home, she starting making pouches, inspired by her grandmother, who taught her how to sew.
"Knowing her and her entire process" and seeing what inspires her is what makes the work even more special, Kroessler said.
Nature factors heavily into her work. While she starts out abstract, layering one material here, another there, there is usually a point in her process where she begins to see the natural world emerge in her paintings.
"I think just by observing nature, there are so many different layers. That's just how beautiful it is. You see a butterfly's wing, and the colors aren't actually coming from any pigment in the wing. It's the architecture of these scales on the butterfly wing and the light hitting it at the right time that creates the appearance of a blue color," she said.
During college, to escape the bustle of the city, she would return on the weekends to stay with her grandparents and paint.
"I never could find a place that I loved more than it, than the nature out here," she said. "I grew up on the water out here, so birds, and nature have always been super inspiring. It was just bird walks with my grandpa and we would get his binoculars and just watch all the birds and he would tell me about all the birds, the swans and the great blue herons and the red-tail hawks and the barn owl."
Busiello's show is a combination of all her worlds, layers of her Sag Harbor self, her Montauk self, her love of nature, and art and fashion.
Ms. Busiello's art and clothing is available for purchase at the Montauk Beach House through tomorrow.
