Last week the Golden Eagle — the only art supply store on the East End, and a hub for art-making classes taught by some of the most talented artists in our area — posted a sign on the street to announce its closing sale. Streams of artists and artist dreamers came through — one artist bought thousands of dollars’ worth of materials, others loading up on tubes and tubes of paint, bouquets of painting brushes, canvases, papers, and other art-making tools.
We talked at the counter, about the gigantic rent the owner of the wonderful old farmhouse that housed the Golden Eagle — store on the first floor, classrooms on the second — now demanded, for a new tenant, perhaps, it was said, yet another furniture and home design store.
In that classroom children made things with their hands, put their fingers into paint, understood that green pigment and red pigment mix together to make brown. And adults gathered in solemn contemplation of the naked human form in figure-drawing class — to draw the limbs, with their pulsing muscles underneath, fingers resting on a thigh, the human head, the model’s proud eyes looking into the distance. The oldest artistic pursuit in history, a way to understand humanity, to observe, to “know thyself,” as the Greeks would say, taught by a seasoned professional artist who has devoted her life to this pursuit and generously shared it with any and all who dared to try.
In the back of the property was a barn. A beautiful wood-trimmed room with an art sink for washing brushes, tables and stools and easels for students to set up for the class of the day. The glowing “Hamptons light” shone through the windows, and students set to work, with serious intent, on their still-life painting of the local flowers or peaches, learning to wash with their brushes the watercolor paints, the colors of a summer sea — or closing their eyes and looking within, then expressing abstraction with a kind of forceful energy they might not feel anywhere else.
Paint, brushes, colors, papers, canvas, pencils, charcoal — the oldest art material known to man, from cave drawing to art students of today, an extension of the fingers, to bring the image before our eyes to a separate identity on paper — to record and study, to make something new and beautiful, a painting, to carry on the human urge to create art that will look back at us and help us understand who we are.
It’s hard to believe a little house, with a little store and studios, run by a kindly, helpful team of devoted community members, could do all of this, isn’t it? Art making is the hardest endeavor, yet so simple. All you need really is that piece of charcoal, and if you don’t have a piece of paper, draw on a rock! Or even dip your toe and draw in the sand of our beautiful beaches.
And yet, the absence of the Golden Eagle will be felt far deeper than “Oh damn, another community mainstay bites the dust and becomes a designer showcase.” Here we are in one of the largest historical and contemporary art centers in the country, if not the world, with a many-centuries list of the greatest artists living and working in our midst, and we can no longer go down the street to get that tube of cadmium yellow we need to paint the glorious sunset looking west on Main Beach, East Hampton, New York, U.S.A.
What even is cadmium yellow? If only we had the Golden Eagle, with its classes and many devoted art instructors, or the artist standing next to you when you are perusing the shelves, trying to make head or tail of the colors and what they mean, who gives you the info. And you walk out proudly with your supplies, and trepidation, onto the Golden Eagle porch, display easels set up for you to imagine your very own painting propped on them. Now you are going to leap into the unknown of beauty and wonder, dirtying your own human hands, daring to take the image hidden inside your mind and heart and splash it onto the canvas, entering the portal to the world of making art.
Dear Golden Eagle, we will miss having you to guide us there.
Barbara Thomas, who lives in Springs, is co-chair of the East Hampton Arts Council. She has been a painter and teaching artist on the East End for over 40 years.