A matter of taste

STONE HARBOR, N.J. - Three summers ago, artist and gallery owner Gary Jacketti came from the contemporary art scene of Beacon, N.Y., into the land of Peter Max and gold-framed paintings of oversized egrets, wine bottles, and beachscapes.

Since then, he says, he's been trying to persuade the well-heeled beach-house owners of Stone Harbor not to take the job of buying art so literally. To get some, well, taste.

"They're selling wealthy people expensive paintings that are worthless," he says boldly of other galleries. (Other galleries demur.)

Beginning Saturday, Jacketti is bringing to his Beacon Art: Shortwave Gallery three paintings by figurative realist Lee Price of New York, who paints nude and nearly nude life-sized portraits of herself, viewed from overhead while lying in bed or in a bathtub, surrounded by gobs of food.

Let's just say, these are not your Uncle Bill's blueberry pancakes.

"I get goosebumps," Jacketti says of Price's work. In addition to Blueberry Pancakes - in which Price hunches over a half-eaten stack of pancakes in a bathtub, a helpful plate of butter balanced on the tub's edge behind her - the gallery will exhibit two other works, Ice Cream and Strawberry Shortcake.

Price's gripping, intimate self-portraits - which are either humorously chaotic and joyful or cathartically revelatory and disturbing, depending on how you view women and food - are sure to stand out in this town.

"It's taking place on a bed or in a bathtub - both those places where you go and you don't think people will see you," says Price, 44, who met Jacketti in Beacon, the Hudson Valley town and artist colony where they both live.

"Just the sheer amount of food in the early paintings, it brought sort of an absurd quality to it, how human beings turn to these compulsive activities thinking it will solve the problem, when really it's making the problem worse.

"I'm sort of laughing at myself," says Price, who struggled with eating disorders years ago. "I'm very sarcastic with my humor. My God, we're so absurd! Just stop and look at what you're doing. You can't stop."

Jacketti and Price acknowledge that her works - priced at $13,000 - may be an uneasy fit in polo-shirted Stone Harbor, whose art aesthetic seems to trend more toward beach scenes and lifeguard-stand portraits.

"They're not looking for contemporary life-size paintings of women lying around with food," says Price. "I know that."

Jacketti says most of what he sells at Beacon Art - which he describes on his website as "A New York Scene in Cape May County" - is to New Yorkers, not Philadelphians. "I bring them down the [Garden State] Parkway," he says of artworks. "They go right back up the Parkway."

Jacketti, who started the gallery because no place in town would carry his own contemporary work, has filled it with artists he knows from Beacon. There are some beach scenes, to be sure, but the gallery trends abstract and bold, not gauzy and reassuring.

Jacketti says Shore homeowners get carried away with the beachy theme and think they have to fill their house with either "masters" (Renoir lithographs and the like) or Shore-themed art. Or maybe a painting of their favorite wine (for the wine cellar, natch), à la oenophilic still-lifer Thomas Stiltz.

"Are these beautiful homes contemporary or traditional? They're contemporary," he says. "Why put a gold-framed beach scene in this house that you're proud of?"

But Kim Miller, owner of Ocean Galleries, where '60s-era Pop postermeister Peter Max arrives triumphantly for a weekend every summer, defends the art in her gallery, and the taste of the typical beach-house buyer, by noting that sometimes people really do want a work of art to capture their time at the Shore.

"Beach art does sell to a lot of clients that walk in off the street," she says. "They want a little piece of where they were, to remember the experience."

As for Jacketti and his gallery (on Second Avenue, just north of 92d), Miller (who's on Third, just south of 92d), says: "I'm proud that he's showing the edgy-type artwork, if that's what he calls it. Everyone has a different following. If he's doing well there, God bless him. He's passionate."

She says her Peter Max weekend - this year's was over July Fourth - is a huge event each summer, with people calling for reservations weeks ahead of time.

"His art evokes a certain emotion," she says. "It has a lot of color, a lot of power, and people like it. I'm just doing my job. It's a lot better than sitting there in a store and waiting for people to come in."

This weekend, Ocean Galleries is exhibiting the work of palette-knife artist Howard Behrens, who suffers from Parkinson's disease and has declared this his final show.

As for Jacketti, he's holding out hope that Price's work, and that of the other artists he is showing, will find their audience. For now, he just rolls his eyes at the two types of customer that most commonly enter his gallery:

"The ones that come in and do the hallway tour," peering into the rooms with the art but not crossing the threshold, and the others, who "look at art with their sunglasses on."

Price says that at one point, there was, ever so fleetingly, discussion about whether, for the Stone Harbor paintings (she paints numerous works from the same photograph), she should put herself in a bikini while eating blueberry pancakes, or strawberry shortcake, or ice cream.

"No way," she said. "No pandering to the Shore people."

Stone Harbor, have a bite.