a day ago
They Grew Up Together in the Hamptons. Now, They're Reshaping the Local Art Scene
The de Kooning Clan
'I just started using color in my drawings,' says Lucy de Kooning Villeneuve, 29, as she leads me through the living room of her childhood home in Springs, the woodsy, low-profile hamlet of East Hampton, New York. She gestures to a stack of pastel watercolors on the coffee table. 'Color is always more fun.'
Lucy de Kooning Villeneuve
Photo: Alessandra Schade
I haven't seen Lucy in over a decade; her white-blond hair, once long and tangled from daily ocean swims, is now straight and cropped at the chin. Her raspy laugh is endearingly familiar, as is the buzz of guests drifting through the open kitchen. It's a cloudless day in May, and she's set up a makeshift studio on the patio: two easels and a low wooden table with bubbling paint tubes and brushes.
Lucy is part of a long line of de Koonings who have made art in or around this backyard. Her grandfather Willem de Kooning bought the land in 1963, building a house and studio on a few wild acres off Springs Fireplace Road. On the opposite end of the oak-dotted lawn, his two-story studio still stands, filled with paintings cloaked in plastic wrap. His wife and artistic counterpart, Elaine de Kooning, kept a studio across the narrow harbor in the North West Woods; and Lucy's mother, Lisa de Kooning, sculpted bronze-cast animals—elephants, cows, rams—many of which still keep watch over the house.
And then, in high school, it was us—a scruffier coalition of local teen artists who worked across various mediums at the de Kooning residence: sculpture (constructing launch ramps for our skateboards), interior design (holding Lucy upside down to stamp painted footprints on the ceiling), and performance art (how many times could one listen to Carly Rae Jepsen's 'Call Me Maybe'?). Growing up, the de Kooning home became an unofficial meeting ground for creative tomfoolery: Lisa de Kooning was a firm believer in play. 'With my mom, there was always paint, art, animals, and fun,' she says. Lisa adopted all kinds of animals for the property: Sara and Joe, the mini ponies; pigs (Peter, Wilbur, Daisy, and Dude); a Clydesdale named Bubba; and Lulu, a white cockatoo. She also helped turn Lucy's bedroom into what we all called 'the neon room,' a UV-lit sanctuary where friends had free reign to paint on the walls, so long as they didn't tag their names, which was deemed 'boring' by the de Kooning clan.
