Incrementally over the past few years, Scott Bluedorn has — somehow, by silent mutual agreement among the gallery-going public — become acknowledged as the artist who is able to distill the quintessence of East Hampton and echo it back in watercolor, graphite drawing, etching, and sculpture.
Born at Southampton Hospital in 1986 and educated at East Hampton’s public schools, Bluedorn has created his own recognizable iconography, a visual lexicon of Here-ness: His icons — often assembled into collage form or clusters of small images that form a new whole — range from the familiar tropes of seaside-resort art (whale tails and windmills, gulls and weathered barns) to the stranger and more subconscious-seeming (cuttlefish, crab claws, curious mechanical gears, muscular sinews, rubber sneaker soles).
Now living in Sag Harbor, Bluedorn did several site-specific installations this past summer, including a whale-shaped labyrinth at the Old Whalers Church in Sag Harbor and an arrangement of magical-looking glass mushroom sculptures at an outdoor property in Woodstock, N.Y. Another of his commissioned works, in homage to Sag Harbor’s literary history, can be seen on Page 43. He does commercial illustration, too — including, for example, the labels for the Greenport Harbor Brewing Company — but is very much a multimedia artist, and his work goes well beyond the obvious, delving into, we’d go so far as to say, our South Fork collective unconscious.