LONG ISLAND, New York—Landscape painter April Gornik’s studio—one of a his-and-hers set she and husband Eric Fischl have built along with their house in Long Island’s North Haven—is probably one of the most discussed in the New York region. This summer the twin A-frame structures, designed by Lee Skolnick, were reproduced at doll’s house scale in Joe Fig’s exhibition “The Studio in Miniature” at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton.

One side of Gornik’s studio is entirely glazed, and it looks out on forest and protected marshland, which is absolutely appropriate for an artist whose work takes its starting point from nature. Gornik is no imitative naturalist, however. Though physical contact with the places that she paints is essential to her—she’s become an enthusiastic traveler as a result—her process involves reinventing the photographs that she works from in several stages. The steps include manipulating the image in Photoshop as well as the more traditional technique of allowing it to mutate as it is being painted. The results seem not only to look like nature, but to feel like it as well.

And in North Haven, she tells ARTINFO, nature seems to have moved into the studio as well.

“I began collecting these bugs when we moved into this house and studio,” she told us. “I kept finding amazing bugs, dead, on the ground, and realized I loved having them around. Until I took this picture of them recently, they were ignominiously sited on a paper towel, which tipped over just before I was going to photograph them, so I took the opportunity to give them a nicer display. My prize is the walking stick carapace, found on a Japanese maple recently, at the bottom left of the photo.

“My rule is never to collect a bug that's alive, and I've lost several golden opportunities to get gorgeous moths, for instance. If they seem mostly dead but are still wiggling a little, I always put them somewhere where they have a fighting chance to recover, then check later to see if they've flown off.”

And does her bug collection have any direct links with her painting? “Although I don't in any way think of myself as a painter of minutiae or animals,” she says, “I am crazy about these creatures and their complexity. They're worlds in themselves, even dead and dried.”