Story by Erin Parish
“Yes, as everyone knows, meditation and water are wedded forever,” Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Scott Bluedorn, born in Southampton, New York, in 1986 and now living and working between Sag Harbor and Bridgehampton, belongs to a lineage of Eastern Long Island artists for whom place is not merely a backdrop but a structuring force. Educated at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, Bluedorn then returned to the East End. The artist also earned a residency at Miami’s influential Fountainhead, an artist residency program, among many others, and has exhibited at the Parrish Art Museum in Watermill, NY.
Bluedorn’s work is not only distinguished by his vast technical range, spanning painting, drawing, printmaking, installation, collage, assemblage, photography, illustration, design, and even GIFs, but also the way these forms coalesce around a single, persistent worldview he describes as a “maritime cosmology.” This vision is shaped by salt air, maritime labor, ecological precarity, the cry of seagulls as the day’s soundtrack, and the long memory of the sea.
Scott Bluedorn. Moby Dick of the Deep. 2012. cyanotype print, edition of 12, 22 by 30 inches
By the late 1800s, European and American aesthetic thought shifted from strict hierarchy to an emphasis on perception, atmosphere, and experience. Painting and design favored immediacy over idealization, focusing on light, surface, and transient effects rather than narrative or moral lessons. Seen in Impressionism and related movements, this sensibility influenced illustration, decorative arts, and architecture, where ornament, pattern, and material presence became important. Scientific and industrial advances encouraged artists to observe nature empirically while acknowledging its instability. In this era, there was a rise of the middle class and the transference from the sea as a place of transport and labor, to one of the pleasures of taking the waters as impetus for healing. It embraced ambiguity and fragmentation and paved the way for modernism’s departure from illusion and fixed meaning.
Eastern Long Island has attracted artists since the nineteenth century, drawn by its light, open marshlands, and rhythms. William Merritt Chase’s establishment of the Shinnecock Hills Summer School of Art in 1891 anchored the region as a serious site of artistic production and, importantly, professional education for women at a moment when access elsewhere was severely limited. Chase’s emphasis on working directly from the landscape helped establish a precedent for art rooted in the lived environment rather than in purely academic concerns. He is often called an American Impressionist, a genre that has gained traction and respect in the art market. That impulse extends through other major American artists, from Homer’s marine scenes to the mid-century influx of abstract painters and ceramicists, and into contemporary practices that increasingly address environmental vulnerability and the climate crisis.
William Merritt Chase, Shinnecock Hills, 1895, oil on canvas, 34 by 39 inches, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of William T. Evans, 1909.
Bluedorn’s work sits squarely within this trajectory. His imagery evokes a Long Island that predates its current identity as a luxury enclave. Before celebrities and speculative real estate, this coastline supported fishing villages, small farms, shipyards, and working harbors. It was this humbler terrain that drew artists like Jackson Pollock, Betty Parsons, and others seeking distance from the market pressures of the city. Bluedorn’s repeated utilization of sea shacks, submarines, ghost ships, and lobster traps as both topic and material resist the visual language of wealth and permanence. His repertoire centers on decay and its effects on his chosen subject matter, not the aggrandizement of mankind’s ego and its signifiers prevalent today.
An essential aspect of Bluedorn’s iconography is the absence of people. Burning ships, abandoned boats, solitary whales, and rotting structures dominate his work and are meditations on human fragility. The sea, a perpetual force, is indifferent to occupation or ownership. His paintings, often in watercolor on found objects, are markedly untextured, closer to illustration than painterly bravura. References surface to Winslow Homer and Gustave Doré, particularly in their shared understanding of the sea as both sublime and threatening. Yet Bluedorn’s work is less heroic and more elegiac, concerned with mankind’s impermanence, failed adventures, and the quiet loneliness of the seafarer.
Drawing is central to his practice. Birds, fish, whales, mushrooms, ships, and hybrid structures populate his works with nineteenth-century draftsmanship and a palpable sense of salt in the air. These images feel less imagined than remembered, as though they emerge from a lifetime of close observation. Man meets nature in these drawings, but never on equal footing. Human structures appear provisional, while timeless organic forms repeat and mutate, revealing an interconnectedness that exceeds linear, manmade order. Hulls mirror whales and growth patterns recur across species. Nature is not romanticized, rather granted agency.
Scott Bluedorn. Visitor. 2022. Cut paper collage on hand-Suminagashi marble paper, 10 by 8 inches
Installation is where Bluedorn’s ecological concerns become most explicit and his work flourishes in the rearrangement of fragments. His site-specific works use repurposed anchor lines, driftwood, r lobster traps, soil, and living plants. In Bonac Blind, a floating, off-grid micro-home installed in Accabonac Harbor as part of the Parrish Art Museum Road Show in 2020, Bluedorn references the traditional local culture of fishing, farming, and hunting. Modeled after a duck blind the structure functions as both shelter and observatory. It addresses the erosion of local culture under pressure from housing scarcity, climate change, and modern development. The work does not propose solutions so much as make visible what is being lost.
Other installations, such as Amsterdam Beach Shack or Stilt House, similarly assert impermanence. Built from driftwood, buoys, reeds, and debris, they echo vernacular architecture while remaining clearly temporary. Their scale is accessible, almost childlike, logical in the way children understand space and shelter. There is always the sense of Moby Dick hovering in the background, the sea as both narrative engine and existential threat.
Scoot Bluedorn, Pope Chair, 2023, reclaimed vintage surfboard, steel chair frame, epoxy. 56 by 22 by 30 inches. photo by John DeFaro
Bluedorn’s printmaking and illustration address the themes of whales, sailors, and maritime symbols. His monoprints function as paintings. His etchings are closely tied to the tattoo aesthetics and late 19th-century printmaking. Photography, meanwhile, attends to texture and aging, aligning him with figures like Joel Meyerowitz in its attention to time embedded in surfaces. Even his design objects, clumsy chairs and lamps made from surfboards, wetsuits, seaweed, and salvaged wood, embrace awkwardness. Their humor, evident in names such as Rocker Rocker or Bonfire Chair, does not undermine their seriousness. They are objects shaped by weather and use, not refinement.
This ecological orientation places Bluedorn’s work in conversation with broader contemporary practices on Eastern Long Island, including artists addressing the climate, water, and land sovereignty. It also aligns closely with the mission of Greenreligion.com, which seeks to illuminate the spiritual, cultural, and ethical dimensions of humanity’s relationship with the environment. The founder of Green Religion, John DeFaro, identifies closely with this imagery, as this is also the location of his upbringing. His project documents how art, belief systems, and ecological awareness intersect to foster care for the planet. Bluedorn’s work embodies these goals not through overt didacticism but through sustained reiteration, anchoring these things as the fodder by which to connect with history. His maritime cosmology asks viewers to consider what it means to live with the sea and how imagination might serve as a form of ecological witness.
In an era of accelerating environmental change, Bluedorn’s vision is neither nostalgic nor naive. It is grounded, patient, and observant. By returning to the same forms and materials, he insists on the continuity of natural systems and the precarity of human presence within them. Eastern Long Island, in his work, remains a site where he finds history, ecology, and art as inseparable, and where the sea continues to shape both culture and conscience.
Scott Bluedorn. Mother Morel (in collaboration with Zach Bliss). 2025. papercrete, steel, wood, variable plant materials, 8 by 6 feet. LongHouse Reserve. East Hampton, NY
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Comentarios
Excellent story. Excited to read future ones. Thank you.