At 91, Cutchogue painter reflects on her life through art

When walking her dog or driving into town, Anita Samuels would always keep a sketchbook handy.

When a particularly striking scene caught her eye — be it a barn or a house, the water or simply the natural landscape — she would stop to sketch the scene, then and there.

Upon returning to her Nassau Point waterfront home, she would walk upstairs to a small room, lit naturally by skylight. There, she painted the world exactly as she saw it, fluid or fragmented, realist or abstract.

“That was my life,” said Ms. Samuels, 91, who still resides in the same home. “I didn’t think about what it was going to mean later on in my life. I did it because it was part of me, I could not stop. As soon as I woke up, I thought about it, and I thought, ‘this is the thing my life is supposed to be about.’ ”

Ms. Samuels has not used her studio for many years. But down the hall, in her son Peter Samuel’s old room, sits a collection of sketches and paintings accumulated over a lifetime. Earlier this year, Doris Brautigan and Mary Goldman, the co-curators of the Cutchogue New Suffolk Free Library’s upstairs art gallery, sorted through these works and pulled out a selection to hang and sell in the library.

The exhibit dedicated to Ms. Samuels’ art, sponsored by the Friends of the Library, opened on March 11, and will run through May 27. About 50 patrons attended the opening reception, where 10 of Ms. Samuels’ paintings were sold, according to Tom Samuels Jr., one of Ms. Samuels three children.

For her community, Ms. Samuels’ work now offers not only insight into the mind of a local unsung artist, but fresh perspectives on the beautiful environment that might pass them by if they never stop to take in the natural world around them.

“I’m happy because people wanted to see what I was painting,” she said. “They’d say to me ‘Is that the way it really was or did you make it up?’ I said ‘This is what I saw’ … Each person sees life differently because of whatever’s happened in their life.”

Born in 1931, Ms. Samuels grew up in Queens. Her grandfather, William Keim, also a painter, bought her her first paint set when she was a child. Her family often spent summers at a home in St. James. While a fondness for Long Island lasted, painting sat on the back burner as she grew older.

She married her childhood sweetheart, Tom Samuels, in 1952. They began summering in Nassau Point in 1963. He worked as a dentist in Queens for many years, but when he received an offer to purchase a marine contracting company in Southampton, they moved their family to Cutchogue year-round.

“I don’t think any of us ever regretted it,” Tom Jr. said.

After raising three children — Peter, who died in 2013, Tom Jr. and Nancy, all of whom inherited their mother’s artistic curiosity — Ms. Samuels dedicated more time to her art. She experimented with various media, from watercolors to oils and collage. She even took wild mushrooms — often poisonous, according to Tom Jr. — and let spores stain her paper and enhanced the piece with pastels.

“She painted hundreds of pictures and got involved in local shows,” her son said. “She was showing at the local museums, at [the Parrish Art Museum] in Southampton … wherever she would apply.”

While much of her work features North Fork scenes, she has dabbled in other disciplines, including portraiture. One of her first is portraits features a man seated with his arms folded across his knees, believed to be inspired by her uncle Lou, whom she described as “introspective.”

Ms. Samuels also ventured beyond the North Fork and those around her for inspiration, taking trips to Europe and Africa and returning with a fresh perspective and inspiration.

“I can look at anything and have it come out the way I wanted it to,” she said. “Not necessarily what I saw, it’s what I made in my head, and then I put it down on my canvas, and it made an interesting piece of work, which inspired me to paint more.”