Sitting in her gallery on the Plaza, barely more than a stone’s throw from Fort Pond to the north and the ocean beach to the south, our cover artist is surrounded by inspiration. Throughout her work, there’s a central presence: the water. Through Candace Ceslow’s eyes, it contains multitudes — vast stretches of shifting emotion that push her to keep putting it down on canvas. The rhythm of the waves can be calming and meditative, as she notes in an artist’s statement on her website, or it can be fearsome. “The waves are ready to be worshiped. They are deities ready to crash and pull you under as sacrifice.”
Ceslow is a native of Amagansett who now lives in Montauk, a few miles east across the Napeague stretch. Montauk has always been a part of her life; she has family there, as well as her gallery/shop. Educated at Adelphi, Ceslow spent her childhood drawing and sketching, using magazines and her favorite celebrities as references. Montauk has shifted with the tides since she was a girl — an ebb and flow of crowds, of storms, of shifting sands, of businesses that come and go — and she has a reverence for how quickly things can change.
This reverence can be seen in our featured piece, Double Dipped, III. The Double Dipped series is centered on a pair of legs rising out of the water, their owner upside-down, below the surface. Ceslow has done a few different iterations of Double Dipped and returned to it recently as a measure of her own personal growth as an artist, to see how her style has evolved.
There’s something open-ended about the moment captured in Double Dipped, III, an ambiguity (going down? surfacing?), and number three, in particular, always draws visitors’ eyes, Ceslow says. “It’s up to the viewer: Are they having fun? Or are they drowning?”