APRIL GORNIK

APRIL GORNIK

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Artist · Environmentalist
Co-founder of The Church · Arts & Creativity Center
Co-director of Sag Harbor Cinema Board

I've chosen my work because I've loved the outside world. I love the things outside of myself. I love what isn't immediate to me. And I love projecting onto that as a way of kind of trying to reach the distance between my inner self and the vastness. To try to do that in a way that makes other people feel inspired by it, not be chided for not taking care of it. It's not something that I intend to be a message per se. I'd rather people look at the natural world and see the heartbreaking beauty of it and sense its fragility and its impermanence and their own impermanence and fragility and then have a response to that rather than say, you know, you have to act, you have to do something. I would hope that would inspire action rather than to cudgel them with a directive.

PETER NICHOLS

PETER NICHOLS

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Author of Granite Harbor · The Rocks · Voyage for Madmen & other books

Although I’m American, I was brought up in England and Europe, and I prefer living in Europe, but I currently live in the United States to be close to my son. I like Maine and have chosen to live here because it seems to me a throwback version of the US, not overrun with strip malls and box stores and the rest of the visual crud of the USA. It’s less spoiled; the modern world seems farther away. Where I live, in Camden on the coast of Maine, it’s postcard pretty, has a still working seafaring industry, an aquaculture industry that is thriving because of the pressures on wild seafood, a farm-to-table culinary scene, all of which is very authentic, self-sustaining, yet feels like an earlier time. I like Maine also because it’s comparatively undeveloped, with large unspoiled natural areas—it’s kind of the Auvergne of the USA—a lot of hiking, sailing, kayaking—which I love to do—available here. I also have a motorcycle, and Maine is a paradise of small roads weaving through beautiful country, thought the winter is long here so the riding season is limited.