this side of paradise; Once there was Pollock and de Kooning.

Byline: Nico Israel

Long before Grubman, Hilton, and Combs ever alighted there, the east end of Long Island was beckoning generations of visual artists to its shores, from William Merritt Chase, who lived and worked in the area in the early 1900s, to Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, who famously dripped, splashed, and prodded paint there in the 1950s. Today, despite formidable real estate prices and the unbearable traffic on the Long Island Expressway, the region continues to be called home-or home away from home-by such art-world luminaries as Cindy Sherman, David Salle, and Jorge Pardo.

This summer, the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton presents "North Fork/South Fork: East End Art Now," a survey of work by 40 artists who reside in or near the Hamptons' hamlets, which makes the claim that the area itself-with its sparkling light and glistening sea-continues to inspire. "It's just amazing working out there," declares portrait painter Chuck Close, who shuttles between New York City and his home in Bridgehampton, sometimes starting a painting in one place and finishing it in the other. He says he can see thousands more colors in the part of the painting made on the island. "There's something truly extraordinary about the light-and about the way the sunlight reflects off the water."

Landscape painter April Gornik, who spends about half of each year in North Haven, near Sag Harbor, with her husband, the artist Eric Fischl, concurs. "The water changes the light," she says. "It's spectacularly pretty." Gornik typically paints not directly from nature but from photographs she digitally alters, emphasizing certain colors and sometimes reshaping the relation of earth to sky. She finds in the Hamptons' countryside "a feeling of mysteriousness and familiarity."

Perhaps attempting to re-create that feeling, the normally staid Parrish has also asked Elizabeth Peyton, best known for her low-affect portraits of rock stars and her own friends, to select works from its permanent collection for an "Artist's Choice" show. It's hard to imagine painting ...