Billy Sullivan

Episode 2Billy Sullivan
Series

Sunlight & Solitude

Sunlight & Solitude brings together works that hold summer in luminous suspension — figures drifting through radiant seas, portraits alive with heat and immediacy, and abstractions that blur like haze. Each piece becomes a meditation on light as memory, presence, and reflection.

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Episode 2 of 6

Billy Sullivan

Born in 1946 in New York, where he continues to live, work, and teach, Billy Sullivan distills the immediacy of lived experience into luminous, memory-laden scenes. Rooted in a diaristic practice, his works capture the vitality of fleeting encounters—gestures, glances, and environments suspended between observation and recollection.

 

Influenced by Fairfield Porter’s realism and Joan Mitchell’s dynamic pastels, and shaped by New York’s artistic and social milieu of Warhol, Max’s Kansas City, and Kenzo, Sullivan renders portraits, still lifes, and seaside scenes with loose, gestural brushwork and bursts of unexpected color. In his summer compositions, casual encounters at the beach become meditations on companionship, intimacy, and the sensuality of light. His art draws viewers not just into the atmosphere but into the memory itself, as participants in moments of warmth and reverie.

Episode

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Jane Car  #2
Billy SullivanJane Car #2, 1971
151.61 x 101.63cm
Clarissa, East Hampton,
Klaus, East Hampton
Klaus in Tulum
Billy SullivanKlaus in Tulum, 2003
182.9 x 133.4cm
Leo & Jesse 2
Billy SullivanLeo & Jesse 2, 2008
106.7 x 162.6cm
Klaus & Clarissa, 29 palms
John Green Socks 1
Agyness London
Lilies, October
Featured Artist

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Lilies, October
Artist
Billy Sullivan
B.1946, American

born in 1946 in New York, where he lives, works, and teaches. Sullivan is best known for a diaristic practice that straddles the vitality of fleeting moments and the construction of retrieved remembrance. Raised in New York City, where he attended the School of Visual Arts, Sullivan came of age in the social milieus around Andy Warhol, Max’s Kansas City, and Parisian fashion designer Kenzo, even as he absorbed such influences as Fairfield Porter’s domestic realism and Joan Mitchell’s dynamic pastels. Sullivan’s paintings, drawings, and photographs are saturated with the intimacy of the “muses” in his own life, present and past—friends, lovers, artists, writers, allies and other collaborators, both known and obscure. Noted for their loose, gestural mark-making and unexpected color combinations, his portraits and still lifes draw viewers into the atmosphere as participants rather than mere observers. ...

More Works By: Billy Sullivan

Christian 1.21.08
Celia Cruz
Billy SullivanCelia Cruz, 1992
33 x 24.8cm
Patricia 2.17.09
Naomi
Billy SullivanNaomi, 1996
25.4 x 35.6cm
David #1
Billy SullivanDavid #1, 1998
36.2 x 26cm
Jackie Curtis 3
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Felip Henin
Series: Sunlight & SolitudeEpisode 3
Felip Henin

Exploring solitude through memories of the Italian Alps, staging figures in sparse, cinematic worlds where presence and absence blur into quiet tension.

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