Sally Egbert: An Underwater World

To get inside the house that Sally Egbert built, you have to trust your intuition, not your logic: It's a right-brain thing.

A left-brain, verbally oriented visitor hammered in vain recently at the East Hampton artist's locked front door, sealed off to create an interior studio wall, before finally being shown in the proper side entrance to the house.

Moments later, a right-brain, spacially integrated photographer drove up and went directly to the side door, no problem. "I just knew that was how to get in," he said.

Aqueous Contexts

Infiltrating the alluring underwater world of Ms. Egbert's new paintings calls for right-brain approach. A frontal attack, and they'll clam up on you. But a casual plunge in from right field, mind a blank, heart agape, and they'll engulf you in their mysterious, biomorphic depths.

Ms. Egbert, a lyrical Abstract Expressionist whose current show at Fotouhi Cramer's Manhattan gallery will run until Nov. 30, has been obsessed with aqueous contexts since moving to the East End in 1982.

A critic for The New Orleans Times-Picayune wrote last year that her "jazzy, off-kilter designs have an organic quality that suits eyes trained by . . . humid vistas," calling her "a Yankee soul-sister to New Orleans artists who thrive on dampness and Gulf light."

"The Water Thing"

The poet Eileen Myles wrote in a recent Art in America review that "Sally Egbert's oil paintings are as hypnotic as aquariums." In one, she said, "the coloring is fanciful and light . . . with a couple of darker enclaves - big purple-gray vertical sections which ground the piece like castles in the tank."

"I'll live somewhere and absorb it for a long time before it slowly comes out in my work," the 37-year-old Ms. Egbert said. "The water thing came partly from swimming at Gurney's Inn in winter and looking at the bottom of the pool and the ocean outside. I love swimming underwater; it's like being in a landscape with little touches of still life."

Ms. Egbert paints on the floor, staying physically close to the canvas and working from every angle, equidistantly on every part of it. "If it's hanging on the wall, I feel remote from the top," she said. "I like my work to be intimate and touchable."

Without Brushes

She uses a brush only rarely, "the little ones you throw away," to add lines that incorporate drawing into the fluid suspension of color.

Mostly, she pours paint directly onto the canvas, moving it around with her hand or a palette knife, creating works that are "energetic, gutsy, and spontaneous," according to The Star's art critic Rose Slivka.

Ms. Egbert was born on coastal Long Island in Bay Shore, where the Fire Island ferries dock.

An absent father - her only memory of him is of sitting in his car - and a young mother who often traveled, obliged her to live during the week with her grandfather and a beloved but strict great-grandmother.

Her Brother's Bar

She excelled in the Catholic schools she attended.

"After school I'd sit in my great-grandmother's house and boys weren't even allowed to call," she said. "Then I'd go to my mother's on weekends, and she wouldn't be home."

"So I'd do crazy things, like going to a Grateful Dead concert with my three older brothers when I was 11."

"I was very comfortable hanging out in my brother's really fun bar," she remembered. "I'd be home alone, and I'd ride my bike over and climb in the window of the ladies room. The people all knew me, and they'd take me in."

"It was weird, back and forth between the nuns and the bar."

Fire Island Summers

At 15, she and school friends began working summers on Fire Island as dishwashers and mother's helpers.

"There were no cars, so no drunk driving," she said. "The worst you could do was ride your bike into the woods. And there were these incredibly colorful gay guys in hot pants with flowers in their hair who'd take us over to Cherry Grove. This is the life, I thought."

Perhaps to compensate for her unsettled childhood, Ms. Egbert drew and painted almost religiously, although "always trying not to be an artist," she said.

"I thought I should learn a trade and have a stable career."

Waitressing

She decided not to be an X-ray technician after a day on the job, however, and dreams of becoming a receptionist with her own desk and phone collapsed after three days.

"So I just worked waitressing in restaurants, which I love," she said. "It's like having family bonds."

After earning a B.S. in visual arts from the State University at New Paltz, she moved to East Hampton to paint, and more or less followed the chef Laura Thorne around, waitressing at the Coast Grill, the Royal Fish, and C. J. Thorne's, among other local restaurants.

"I could come and go as I pleased, and didn't have to wear real clothes like pantyhose and shoes and makeup," she said. "I have a friend who works in a bank, and it would take me three days to put myself together the way she does in 25 minutes."

Back Of Menus

Having received no real formal art education or training at New Paltz - the art history course ended at Van Gogh and Gauguin and she'd never even heard of Andy Warhol - she began making figurative paintings that in retrospect look like Milton Avery's with "a faint psychotic edge," she said. She'd never heard of Milton Avery, either.

These views of slightly skewed suburban interiors, with their Diane Arbus undertones, are done on the backs of restaurant menus.

"COAST GRILL. Avocado and chicken salad, Clams on the half-shell, Thai beef," we read on one side. There's a semi-abstract painting or nude drawing on the other.

"I always took home the old menus when they changed them," Ms. Egbert said. "They were made of such high-quality paper."

A Living From Art

"At first," she said, "I gave all my paintings away, never seeing the connection between art and money even though I was hitchhiking back and forth between two jobs. Then I suddenly realized that artists are entitled to make livings; I began to sell my work."

She started showing locally at the former Bologna-Landi Gallery the year she arrived. Her work has since been exhibited at the East Hampton Center for Contemporary Art, the Springs Art Gallery, Renee Fotouhi Fine Art, Guild Hall, the Parrish Art Museum, the Islip Art Museum, the Heckscher Museum, and at galleries in New York and Tokyo.

She has won a New York State Council on the Arts grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and, this year, a grant from the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts.

"Pirates' Den"

While her sometimes exuberant, sometimes brooding paintings are always soothing to her, they are at times disturbing to others.

"They're emotional portraits that take on their own spirit and lead their own lives, but I feel safe with them around," Ms. Egbert said. "While I've always loved colors, I'm not afraid of heavy, dark works with a lot of black. We spend half our lives in the dark, and some of the lighter paintings are more subtly scary to me."

One of her blackest, most dramatic works, called "Pirates' Den," is "where pirates who've murdered people and robbed their gold go at night for the party," she said.

Colors Remembered

Another glowing, almost iridescent work is called "Medicine."

"It's gentle and beautiful, like medicine that heals the sick," she said. "But here's a subconscious tension: things could go either way, and that's what makes it exciting."

"I've been carrying shapes and colors from childhood around all my life," the artist went on. "One day I made a painting using a lot of this vivid orange, and I realized it was the color of my great-grandmother's kitchen chairs."

"Another time, this pinky-red kept coming out. It suddenly clicked that it was the color of my mother's nail polish - I remembered her nails jabbing into my arms. Wow, I thought, this is pretty wild."

This process of recollection keeps you focused on your spirit, Ms. Egbert explained.

"You have to take risks and let things into the painting even if they ruin it. Can you imagine Pollock thinking, oh, dear, maybe I shouldn't do this? Absolutely not; he held nothing back."

"And I love those big Julian Schna bel paintings with all the broken crockery in them, kind of like a smack in the face. You have to be daring, in life as well as in art."

Family Life

Along with two cats, Charcoal and Snowy, Ms. Egbert shares her house with her 81/2-year-old son, Bobby. His father, Danny Shea, a country-and-western musician and vintage guitar dealer, lives nearby, and the family is very close.

"Bobby has a schedule and a lot of stability, unlike what I had," she said. "I tell him to do what he feels he has to do, as long as he's not hurting anyone, to be true to himself, which is what being an artist is."

She thought a minute. "People told me I'd never paint again if I had a child," she said. "But just the opposite is true. A child is a huge responsibility that's made me more focused and disciplined. I don't have time to be self-indulgent any more, and I never have a creative block. My life is just much richer."