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Arts & Entertainment

In Art ,Too, Big Things Can Come in Small Sizes

The East End Arts Council "Miniatures" show brings talent into small spaces.

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand,” once wrote English poet and mystic William Blake.

The East End Arts Council wasn’t working on quite such a small scale, but at the opening of its ‘Miniatures’ show on Friday, the council’s members displayed their talents and universes in spaces no larger than 12 inches by a foot and a half.

Farmingville’s Karen George Mortimore’s black and white photograph “Frozen in Time,” was among the most unusual works in the show: a seated, headless snow figure—a human figure, not a snowman—on a bench, arms stretched along the back of the bench. The background is totally black.

Mortimore said, “It’s two works in one: a snow sculpture and a photograph. It was near the water in Patchogue at night. I took me three hours to make the snow sculpture. I came back the next day for more photos but it had been vandalized.”

William Behrle of Jamesport’s oil painting, “Saltwater Marsh,” evoked the quiet beauty of an untouched backwater. A former elementary teacher in the Longwood School District, Behrle began painting in 2001, after retiring.

“Usually I paint in watercolor,” he said. “This took about three weeks to dry. I had it in the basement; I had to bring it upstairs, where it was less damp, to dry. I actually had another painting I wanted to put in the show, but it wasn’t dry yet.”

Mattituck’s Jo-Ann Coretti’s painting-like photo, “Winter on the North Fork,” showed the leafless vines of Pindar Vineyard. “I changed some of the browns in Photoshop to get more yellow and red,” she said, adding that it drew more of the life she felt was always there amidst the apparent dullness of winter.

“Into the Light,” by Rosemaria Eisler, seemed on the border of impressionism and expressionism: figures under an umbrella appeared more toward a more lighted corner of the work, a solar etching, a process the artist learned from Sag Harbor’s Dan Welden.

“Everything I do has to be with umbrellas,” said Eisler, born in Mexico and who now lives in Ridge. “When I was little my mother told me I was always watched over from above. I thought the sky at night was like an umbrella, with the stars holes through which I was being watched.”

Pointing to her work, she added, “My figures are always going somewhere—to the light.”

There are too many works at the show to enumerate , though some others that caught the eye were:

Pat Swyler’s “Purity,” a small mask the Sound Beach artist endowed with a an equal mix of the primitive and the futuristic; Riverhead’s Gayle Wagner, whose cow, “Peeking Out the Barn Door,” gave this bovine a child-like face; and Calverton’s Linda Nemeth’s very small painting, “Water Tank,” a functional, homey geometry high in the sky.

The East End Arts Council is located at 141 East Main Street. The exhibition runs through Feb. 25.

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