Bill Sullivan (artist)
from The University of Pennsylvania, where he studied with Fairfield Porter, Neil Welliver, Jane Freilicher, John Button and Rudy Burckhardt.
In 1957, when he was 15 years old, Sullivan was spending a summer washing dishes in Lenox, Massachusetts, and met Claes Oldenburg, who was there working at a resort and running a small gallery in a barn.
He worked as a night dishwasher at Café Figaro which, along with the San Remo Bar across the street, was a place where writers and artists congregated.
In 1977, Sullivan met the Colombian writer Jaime Manrique at Julius—a historic gay bar in Greenwich Village—and shortly after began a romantic relationship that lasted until the artist's death in 2010.
"[3] In the 1990s Sullivan devoted himself to painting the landscape of New York City, in particular the skyscrapers of Midtown Manhattan, and iconic interior spaces such as Grand Central Station.
Reviewing the exhibit in the New York Times, William Zimmer wrote: "Appealing in a cozy level is the painting 'Moon Over St. James' by Bill Sullivan in which a full moon and a row of theaters with their marquees lighted have a kind of equal divinity.
About his work, John Ashbery said: "With only a tinge of irony, Bill Sullivan makes new the vast spaces and swooning optimism of nineteenth-century Luminist painting.
While there has been a tendency among some contemporary artists to present a revisionist view of the 'great outdoors' of nineteenth-century landscape painters, Sullivan has no satirical agenda.
After spending several years in South America amid the landscapes that attracted Frederic Edwin Church and Martin Heade, among others, he refined and strengthened this awesome imagery after returning to New York.
His work is an exaltation, a desolate yet fully realized splendor, which he renders with the serenity and wisdom of someone for whom light and color are familiar instruments used to create mystery.
His roots and concerns take him from a dreamy, organic, and telluric world toward limitless horizons where the real and the magical (intelligence and imagination) merge in perfect balance.
"[8] Reviewing the 2012 show "Highlights from the Albany Institute of History and Art" at The Florence Griswold Museum, Martha Schwendener wrote in The New York Times (Connecticut edition): "Bill Sullivan's "Twilight at Olana" (1990), refers to the Persian-inspired mansion on the Hudson built by Church, who grew rich from his paintings.
