Billy Sullivan: The Art Of The Personal
A slide show at the painter Billy Sullivan's studio off Route 114 in East Hampton turned out to be neither a solemn parade of canvases nor a doting collection of family photos but a little of both, with funny remarks and irreverent asides thrown in for laughs.
Mostly of pieces from his current show at the Fischbach Gallery in New York, the slides included ink drawings of local birds, pastels of nudes, pictures of dogs, portraits of friends, and paintings of his sons.
Although his work is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Art Museum of South Texas, and is in numerous corporate and private collections, there's nothing pretentious about Mr. Sullivan.
Just as he never refers to himself as William, or even Bill, neither did he try to impress a recent visitor with his personal majesty.
Dave, Archie, Harry
"This is called 'Archie and Jane,' " he said about a playful painting of a white bulldog and a woman's leg, beside a body of water. "Archie's the dog. That's Jane Rosenblum's leg, and that's Georgica Pond."
"Dave and Archie," a pastel, depicts Archie with a black bulldog belonging to Mr. Sullivan's companion, Klaus Kertess, whose foot, like Ms. Rosenblum's leg, also seems to be in the picture by accident.
Another work shows his 21-year-old son, Sam, in a black wool hat and a Dave-photo T-shirt in Wainscott; another, his son Max's dog, Harry, posing in Colorado, and another a motley crew of clownish blackbirds, bluejays, cardinals, and a velvety mourning dove sketched from his dining room table.
Recently back from Hollywood, where he was flown to do the paintings for a film about a gay artist who lives across the hall from a writer played by Jack Nicholson, Mr. Sullivan also showed works from that gig.
Directed by James L. Brooks of "Terms of Endearment," the film, "Old Friends," will be released this Christmas.
Ross Bleckner plays a lawyer, Skeet Ulrich a hustler who beats up the artist, and Helen Hunt of "Twister" the female lead as the artist's model.
A pastel of Skeet is in the show, along with several pastels of Kathleen White, a friend of Mr. Sullivan's and the model for the nude drawings made in his Bowery studio - supposedly of Ms. Hunt - that were used in the film.
"What a scene," he said. "The director had just discovered Degas, and bombarded me with faxes and phone calls from Hollywood telling me to make Kathleen look as Degas-ish as possible, posing her like 'The Bather,' and so forth."
Artist To Actor
Eventually Ms. Hunt tore up most of the drawings, even though they weren't of her body.
"She was scared of guys seeing them on the Internet, and destroyed them. I was stunned. It was like the old book-burnings, only Hollywood style."
"The movie has a surrealist quality," he said. "It's theoretically about the New York art scene - they completely recreated Jane Freilicher's studio for it - and also asked me to advise the actor on how to play a queer artist."
"I told him to move his hands a lot, and suggested black clothes. They had him in floral prints and Hawaiian stuff dating back to Cherry Grove in the '60s."
Pivotal Painting
One of the pivotal paintings he was asked to make was of a mother, with her breasts exposed, towelling her son's head.
"Part of me wouldn't let me think this was supposed to illustrate why the artist went gay - it was too lame a theme," he confessed.
When they later recast Louise Fletcher, the mean nurse in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," as the mother, he was flown back to Hollywood to paint her head in above the breasts. "That made more sense," he said.
Mr. Sullivan, the younger of two children, was born in New York City in 1946 and grew up in Brooklyn. He attended a Catholic grammar school where, in the pre-dyslexia-diagnosis days, he was known simply as "a horrible student."
What The Doctor Ordered
His mother, one of a family of 12 kids, "was sharp as a whip and very understanding," despite having gone no further than fourth grade. She worked as a switchboard operator, while his father held a menial job on Wall Street.
In a great stroke of good luck, the family doctor urged the young artist to take the exam for the new High School of Art and Design near his Manhattan office.
It was just what the doctor ordered.
"It took me out of Brooklyn every day and planted me in Bloomingdale's basement, through which I walked from the subway to the school, on 57th Street. It was a totaly different place, designed for gifted kids, with great teachers, where I sort of found myself."
Mr. Sullivan won a scholarship to the fine arts department of the School of Visual Arts, and embarked on a wild nightlife of disco-hopping, drinking, and cutting up '60s-style.
He went out every night, to Max's, Arthur's, Ondine, any club where the bouncers liked him. At Scene East he met Amy Goodman, another of the P.Y.P.s - pretty young people, as they were called - and fell in love with her. The two were married in 1968, the year he graduated from Visual Arts.
An Attraction
"It was like a fairy tale. She came from a good family, we had a big wedding, and went around the world on our honeymoon. When we got back, we bought a brownstone at a great bargain on the Upper West Side, and went to Max's every night. I kept painting. We had two kids; it was great."
The young family began renting summer houses in the Hamptons in the early '70s. One night, after a party, Mr. Sullivan went for a swim with Mr. Kertess, whom he'd met casually at the writer's Bykert Gallery in New York, and realized there was a strong attraction between them.
"I sort of thought I could juggle both things at first," he said about the looming conflict with his growing family. "Klaus was then living with a woman artist, and it took us a long time to work it all out."
"Of course none of us had a clue about what we were doing. We were the young kids on the block, out of our minds in that pre-AIDS era when everything was allowed."
Salad Days
While Mr. Sullivan wouldn't trade the drama of his salad days for anything, he's "not so wild and confused and lost anymore," and pleased still to be on loving terms with his ex-wife and sons.
"I had a hard time figuring out who I was, and that I was going to spend my life with a man," he said. "But once I got it, I was okay."
Through it all, Mr. Sullivan kept painting. He began appearing in group and solo shows at the Kornblee, Holly Solomon, and Fischbach galleries in New York, and in galleries and museums around the country and the world.
"I love all kinds of art, and always did," he said. "I knew I was an artist from day one, and never experienced not knowing what I wanted to be."
Drawn To Fashion
He has always done portraits, thinking of them as less than art, as ways to pay the rent. But getting into a person's life and turning it into something else, he realized, is the way art works.
He has also been forever drawn to fashion, on the edge of art, and was commissioned two years ago by The New York Times Magazine to cover the Milan, Paris, and New York openings.
"It was a grueling but wonderful experience. I got a better view of the fashion world, and got to make art out of it, too."
Animal Subjects
An earlier trip to Deauville during the Paris openings broadened another lifelong obsession - with animals. "I've always painted dogs, but one morning, after staying up all night in the casino, we drove out into the countryside and there were these terrific white French cows."
They turned up in his work, along with a highly pedigreed breed of cows he saw in Texas, and eventually were joined by pigs, swans, and, his current fascination, birds.
"My art is about chronicling my life," he summed things up, gazing out the dining room window at the latest flight of grackles.
"I've been taking photos for the last 30 years, then making drawings which give me the freedom to feel comfortable with paint, brushes, and pastels, and just to let things happen. When a painting works out, it sort of rises above its subject."
They've been working out for him a lot over the past five or six years, he said with a smile. "I'm feeling more secure about who I am and what I'm doing than ever before. Maybe I'm a late bloomer: everything's falling into place."