ARTIST PROFILE

Scott Sandell

Documenting Life Via Art

New York artist Scott Sandell’s work reflects early Asian influences, a passion for water, “ghosts” and much more.

By Susanne Casgar
ABN Editorial Director

“When I was a little kid growing up in Minnesota, I was fascinated with the Asian art that I would see in art galleries,” says New York artist, Scott Sandell. “I would look at Japanese paper and I’d think, ‘What could I do with that?’ The Asian cultures fascinated me—the history, the food and primarily, the art. There was such seduction for a boy growing up outside Minneapolis.”

Never forgetting his fascination with the Japanese paper he admired as a child, Scott Sandell attended college at the University of Minnesota, but studied painting, thinking that prints and works on paper were rather “souvenir-like.” He was completely taken with the romance of colorfield paintings and was inspired by a quote from Frank Stella: “I want my paintings to look as good as the paint does in the can.” Sandell continues, “The idea of 12 feet of red was absolutely earthshaking for me, and artists like Ken Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, Stella and Morris Louis, laid the groundwork for the universe I wanted to work in.”

He later learned, however, that he was required to take a printmaking class in order to graduate, and his feelings changed dramatically. Sandell was lucky enough to attend the lithography class of Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) master printer Zigmunds Priede. When Priede taught his students to create luscious ink washes on stone, he would “pull out three or four Jasper John prints, and pin them up on the wall. He would talk about each piece, inspiring us and constructively pushing us to amazing heights,” says Sandell. During the ’70s, the printmaking department at the University of Minnesota launched the professional careers of many artists and master printers. “Slowly, Zig’s devoted students started to disappear, only to reappear later as master printers at ULAE. At one point, everyone but the chef at ULAE was from the University of Minnesota.”

Although Sandell had fallen in love with printmaking, and works on paper in general, he had two things holding him back from joining his college friends as master printers. First, he didn’t feel that he could print as well as they could, and second, he had a feeling that he wanted to be an artist. “I had trouble printing a great tusche wash, and went for a sense of abandonment in my printmaking,” Sandell says. “I started inking the entire press bed, then would build collages right on the layer of wet ink, throwing on a sheet of BFK and running it through the press.

“In the early 1980s, I started using the lightweight Asian papers as the substrates, and the results allowed me to make the work look like traditional Asian banners, kimonos and shop curtains. The papers were usually covered with an ink wash, and I printed imagery using aluminum plates on my own etching press,” he says. Sandell worked on the Asian papers for 20 years, and now feels that it is out of his system.

In 2000, he went back to his printmaking beginnings. For a while, he was even making his own paper, which he considered to be tremendous fun. “It gave me the opportunity to spend the day soaking wet, and today, I design, build, and sail high-performance racing sailboats for fun. There’s almost always a new boat under construction in my studio.” Sandell builds small racing boats called “Moths,” which are a development class, meaning you can design your own shapes with several rules. He won the U.S. Modern Moth Nationals in 1998, 2002, and 2003, all in boats that he designed and built. At the nationals in 2000, “my boat blew apart and sunk after 16 capsizes,” says Sandell. “Nobody’s perfect; certainly not me!”

His love for water and his daily forays in his boat have become the subject of his “Rowing Pictures,” which he says are part of a huge body of work that he’s been accomplishing over the past several years—“essentially my notebook in real form.”

Sandell goes on to say that the meditative effect of kayaking also prepares him emotionally to transition from everyday family life and to create pieces for his more somber “Ghost” series, which are “larger pieces with a political noir theme. Sandell says the works are named after people whose deaths have everything to do with politics. For example, one of Sandell’s works, “Wellstone,” is named after Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash in October 2002. “These pieces,” says Sandell, “usually happened around the same time that the subjects met their demise.”

Sandell’s current series of collages reflect a rekindled interest in drawing that is illustrated in both the compositional elements of a work, as well as the way these elements are assembled.

Speaking on the process involved in creating the collage series, Sandell says, “My printmaking has entered into a state of serious abandonment, and I know my process would make my college friends cringe. Rather than using a plate or stone, I print directly off the press bed, using what are effectively stencils, or exotic kozo papers, as the matrix. Instead of a very controlled use of stiff ink, I use very large amounts of highly pigmented lithographic inks that sometimes ooze out the back end of the press. Any sheet of paper may go through the press 30 times until it has a sufficient painterly look and feel.”

Sandell feels that the work has taken on a life and ambition of its own, and that “each new piece attempts to make the previous look like plain vanilla. It’s scary, really, but I think it’s why I get up in the morning…just to see what happens.” Although the tools and techniques of printmaking are used in the creation of the new work, these pieces have more in common with paintings than prints. Each work is an original collage, built from panels that Sandell prints on an etching press in his New York studio. Many layers of highly pigmented lithographic inks provide a lush, painterly surface, with fragments of colors and shapes from previous layers, which expose clues to the visual history of each panel.

The last couple of years have also seen some other interesting studio activities. After having interest in it for more than 20 years, Sandell started designing wine labels that incorporated his art work. Inspired mostly by the romantic notion of Baron Phillippe de Rothschild’s idea of commissioning artists to create a label for his Château Mouton, Sandell was then suddenly called into service by his friend, Richard Pisacano, to create a label for his Roanoke Vineyards 2000 Merlot. He has found designing labels to be “the ultimate visual challenge.” His images can now be found on wines from both coasts.

Lately, Sandell has been collaborating with fellow artist Paul Chojnowski on a wide ranging group of work, which they call “Threadlines.” Sandell and Chojnowski met at Artexpo New York in 2001, and found their creative interests quite similar. Their first collaborative project was a series of large collages built from Chojnowski’s altered digital photographs.

“Paul threw me for a loop when in advance of the ‘Threadlines’ show, he sent the photos printed on extremely light-weight Japanese unyru paper,” says Sandell. “As far as I was concerned, the only thing to do was to build the collages, and then laminate them to fiberglass. The work looked like a cross between a 1960s longboard (surfboard), and stained-glass windows built by Timothy Leary. The glasswork was a natural spin-off of the boat building, and all the materials were already in the studio. Last year’s ‘Threadline’ show saw the art only on large monitors installed on the gallery walls. The work was totally virtual and existed only for the duration of the exhibit. This was quite a far cry for my usual work where the hand of the artist is key. However, I felt it was an important exercise to see if I could bend my thinking.”

In the interest of expanding his thinking, and stepping out of what he felt was comfortable in understanding his own work, Sandell has been an artist-in-residence in the Sag Harbor, NY, schools for the past couple of years. The last year was spent working with high school students building a site-specific sculpture. This 30-foot-tall piece, evocative of sails and giant fighting kites, will be permanently installed outside in Sag Harbor.

Sandell’s work can be found in the U.S. Embassy in Caracas, Venezuela, the U.S. State Department in Havana, Cuba, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Emory University, Atlanta, and many prestigious corporate collections around the world. Site-specific works include projects for the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Doha, Qatar, the Mito Plaza in Tokyo, Caesar’s Palace and the Main Hotel in Johannesburg.