Bill Sullivan

Bill Sullivan’s sublime use of color elevates the cityscapes of Midtown Manhattan, the mountains and volcanoes of the Colombian and Ecuadorian Andes, and the Hudson River Valley in his landscape paintings. Drawing inspiration from Luminist painters like Frederic Church and Sanford Gifford, as well as the painterly realists of the New York School, Sullivan distinguished himself in his generation. He transformed his own vision of these places into what John Ashbery described as “a certain surreality.”

Sullivan weaves abstract passages of gradating color between the striated clouds that stretch across the horizon, creating surreal sky patterns that are a hallmark of his work: a blend of design and color that feels otherworldly. Reviewing Sullivan’s 2006 retrospective at the Albany Institute of History and Art, Alfred Corn wrote in Art in America, “Comparing these paintings with actual scenes, you see that Sullivan is willing to alter scale and detail so as to make a more coherent picture; realism has to make concessions to design and expression.”

Born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1942, Sullivan studied at Silvermine College and the University of Pennsylvania, where he learned from Fairfield Porter and Neil Welliver. His first solo exhibition, of figures and still lifes, was in 1970 at the Bowery Gallery, after which he turned to landscape. He traveled in South America for several years with his partner Jaime Manrique, culminating in a solo show at Bogotá’s Museo de Arte Moderno in 1978. Back in New York he kept exhibiting before moving to Hudson in 2002, where he lived until his death in 2010.