Jeremy Blake

Artist Jeremy Blake is missing, according to New York City investigators, and he apparently drowned himself Tuesday night, said Lance Kinz, co-owner of the Manhattan art gallery that represents Blake. Police said a man "tentatively identified" as Blake was seen stripping to his shorts and disappearing into the surf at Rockaway Beach in Queens, N.Y., where no body had been found by Friday. Kinz said Blake's friends are convinced it was him because his wallet and clothes were found in the sand.

It's been just eight days since rising art star Jeremy Blake was seen wandering into the ocean off New York's Rockaway Beach -- presumably to his death -- a week after he discovered that his blogger-filmmaker girlfriend, Theresa Duncan, had taken her life in their East Village apartment. But the apparent double suicide of this glamorous, intellectual couple has confounded and disturbed the art world in New York, London and Los Angeles, where they lived together for several years.

Police in New Jersey are enlisting the public's help in identifying a body presumed to be that of Jeremy Blake, a rising art star who was seen wandering into the ocean off New York's Rockaway Beach on July 17, after leaving behind his clothing, his wallet and a suicide note. His girlfriend of 12 years, blogger-filmmaker-writer Theresa Duncan, took her life in the couple's East Village apartment earlier this month. The body was discovered by a fisherman approximately 4 1/2 miles off Sea Girt, N.

A body found by a New Jersey fisherman last month was that of artist Jeremy Blake, the New York Police Department confirmed Tuesday. Police believe Blake, 35, committed suicide July 17 by drowning himself at Rockaway Beach in Queens. He disappeared a week after his girlfriend, filmmaker Theresa Duncan, 40, committed suicide in their East Village apartment. Blake, who worked as a graphic designer for a video game manufacturer, was considered a rising star in the modern art world.

On the evening of July 10, rising art star Jeremy Blake returned to his New York apartment, a converted rectory at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery that he shared with his girlfriend, Theresa Duncan. The couple, extremely devoted and still very much in love after 12 years, had eaten a late lunch together, and Blake invited the church's assistant pastor over for a drink.

RE "Why'd They Do It?" by Chris Lee, July 25, and "In a Cocoon of Their Making," by Chris Lee, Aug. 3: The years that I spent working with Jeremy Blake, through my gallery, Works on Paper Inc., in Los Angeles, were productive and amazingly exciting. It was an experience that continues to positively influence an approach to my own curatorial practice. His video work, often referencing formal conventions of painting, was progressive and deeply intelligent.

THERESA DUNCAN worked hard to get out of Lapeer, Mich., where she was born in 1966, and where, last month, she was buried. On her blog, the Wit of the Staircase, the writer and filmmaker compared Lapeer to the small Texas town in Peter Bogdanovich's "The Last Picture Show." "You would think it was 1951," she wrote, adding that her birthplace was "similarly subject to incredible boredom punctured by baroque social intrigue."