MAKING WAVES

Susannah Sakal

An artist all her life in one form or another, Susannah Sakal often finds herself using watercolors and sketching with pens while she’s traveling – which she tries to do for several months every winter with her husband, Paul – but that’s only because they’re the easiest things to transport on a boat. When she has more room to expand in her home studio here on the Outer Banks, Susannah prefers to work with resin – a versatile substance that’s well-suited to her imagination. “Waves are my passion, and this is my favorite way to make them,” Susannah says of the liquid medium, which she mixes to fine-tune the incredibly precise colors she envisions. “It can move like water, so it captures that certain type of energy.”

MAKING WAVES Taylor Williams

Only five years ago, Taylor Williams was working as a local barista when she stumbled onto a whole world of oil painters on social media – and it was like nothing she’d ever seen before. With the help of some YouTube tutorials and a lot of persistence, Taylor taught herself to paint by honing in almost exclusively on waves in the beginning. Though the 26-year-old has since branched out to include seascapes, every one of her paintings start with a photograph she’s personally taken. “You might think a wave is just blue and white – but sometimes it’s purple,” Taylor adds. “I only pick the reference photos that stick out to me, which is why color is so important. I’m not making it up.”

Jackie Koenig

The biggest impact on Jackie Koenig’s creative practice wasn’t her fine arts degree – it was the early encouragement of her artistic grandmother. Years later, Jackie describes her personal style as intuitive – perhaps even slightly chaotic when there’s paint on the floor and she’s working on multiple pieces at the same time – but that’s exactly when she has the most fun with it. Besides, when you’re a mom to three young boys, sometimes you have to do what you can to make things work. “It’s not just one dimensional,” Jackie says of her affinity for capturing a similar sort of chaotic beauty in coastal landscapes. “You’re never really going to master moving water – it just draws you into the feeling of a place.”

MAKING WAVES

Dave Rollins

Decades of working as a professional graphic designer made one thing very clear to Kill Devil Hills-based artist Dave Rollins: He did not have the temperament for routine paperwork. With a need to be constantly making something, it was only a matter of time before his creative energy spilled outside of his nine-to-five into an equally fulfilling side gig – and years of experimenting with digital illustration as an artform taught him that he could lean into his love of pop art and embrace the theory that landscapes are so soothing precisely because of their visual simplicity. “The idea is to take out all the clutter of the real world, and distill that fluidity down to basic geometric shapes,” Dave explains. “That’s the challenge I like the most.”

MAKING WAVES

Brent Nultemeier

Artist, musician, graphic designer and father of three, Brent Nultemeier recalls feeling absolutely shocked the first time someone paid him for a painting. In the 16 years since he moved to the Outer Banks from Richmond with his wife, Brent had gotten used to the fast pace of working multiple jobs to make ends meet. But when a drastic slowdown during the pandemic forced him to recalibrate, it also helped him rediscover an earlier appreciation for watercolors – and a lifetime of surfing gave him a unique vantage point when it came to thinking about what constitutes a perfect wave. “I’ve seen so many types of waves in my life, and every one of them has their own characteristics,” Brent says thoughtfully. “They’re like fingerprints.”