The never ending list of talented East End artists to discover is one of the things that makes the Hamptons such a special place to live. Whether it’s discovering a new contemporary ingenue, or being introduced to yet another highly collectible artist who has chosen the Hamptons as their permanent home, we are lucky to be surrounded by such a culturally creative community. This week, KDHamptons explores the colorful, painterly works of Bruce Lieberman in this new Featured Artist Diary below:

Recently showcased at The Art League of Long Island’s “Painterly Landscapes from Claude Monet to April Gornik”, on April 11th, Bruce shares: “My work seeks a relevant, modern vocabulary for my brand of representational painting. I paint in series and for over 30 years, I seem to drift back and forth between similar themes. Ultimately, I am trying to create the greatest paintings that I can make. Always, in the life of a painting, there is an excitement in what that experience allows. The experience of being immersed in the process. For me, it is absolutely not about just recording appearance, but an exploration of the relationships. Composing, exploiting and contorting those relationships and how paint happens to lay down – the surface. In the studio it is battle, or dance, or a collision of the accidents. To manipulate and suspend those moments is ultimately how my paintings are constructed.”

“I think about painting in formal compositional terms that relate back to the debt I have, in many ways, to certain Modernist and Abstract Expressionist ideas. I studied in the late 70’s at Stony Brook University with Badelmenti, Perkarsky and the sculpture Robert White and then at Brandeis with Paul Georges. Bobby White, who having studied with Saint-Gaundens, infused in me a sense of lineage among other things. Bobby introduced me to Paul Georges. And thru Paul Georges, it was the eclectic openness of Hoffmann and Leger that would influence and take a life long hold. I was incredibly young and a blank slate. The love I had for Piero, Rembrandt, Titian and “the big boys” was reinforced and validated.”

After many years living and exhibiting in the New York figurative community, Lieberman moved his studio to Water Mill in 1990. “I came to the East End for surf, a bigger studio and to escape suburbia, which ultimately seemed to follow me. It was here I became associated with the Long Island landscape tradition/movement, which happened only after a huge theft from Gotham Fine Arts, my former gallery, resulting in a loss of about 2 years worth of large figurative and narrative paintings. I was left with only small landscapes and still lifes. From these, I was selected to be included as the youngest painter in Ronald G. Pisano’s book, 20th century Long Island Landscape Painting, (New York Graphic Society, Little, Brown Date Published:1990 ). It rather was ironic, this eventual transition from my being a New York painter – making somewhat neo-expressionist figurative paintings, with the landscape as a background, to people thinking of me as a Long Island landscape painter.”

Whether still life, figures or landscapes, Lieberman says his work “continues to be a search for a personal painting style, one that marries the abstract to the concrete. A still life for example, is often imbed with a personal symbolism and narrative. A continual search for a personal iconography, an auto-biographical unembarrassed examination with it’s roots in the history of Art.”

For more information, and to view Bruce Lieberman’s work, please go to: http://www.brucelieberman.com

…and don’t miss Bruce Lieberman’s upcoming shows:

* April 25 – May 16th, he will be featured in show called Poetry and the Art of Eating, in Setauket at Gallery North.

* April 11th, at The Art League of Long Island “Painterly Landscapes from Claude Monet to April Gornik”, my father Bruce was among the artists under discussion.