by Michele Malinchak
As a naturalist, mushroom forager and bird watcher, artist Sean Mount spends most of his time among trees. Hiking the hardwood forests for places to paint, he depicts what is both familiar and mysterious about the woods he grew up with.
“I spend a lot of time in the woods searching for happenstantial compositions as well as preconceived ones,” he said.
A self-taught oil and watercolor artist, he’s known for his large wooded landscapes and paintings of local creeks. His realistic works are remarkably complex, depicting each plant species within an ever changing environment. He paints the stark reality of the natural world, which can be beautiful and chaotic at the same time.
“Landscapes ground us in the world we live in,” he said in a Phillips’ Mill ArtTalk interview with Laura Womack.
“My paintings show the landscape now with young woods that grew up out of what used to be fields a hundred years ago,” he said. “I show invasives as well as the beloved native plants of my childhood. I’m trying to be honest about the woods we have.”
Much of his knowledge of plants comes from his mother and grandmother, both naturalists who taught him the difference between native and invasive species. His keen powers of observation also made him a natural for bird watching and mushroom foraging. As a boy he remembers combing the woods for morels and chanterelles with friends.
He fondly recalls the native black raspberries of his youth. His watercolor entitled, “My Beloved Black Raspberries,” pays homage to the plant and the struggles it faces for survival.
Attentive to detail, Sean studies plants and the shapes of leaves. “I’m not disciplined in real life, but in my paintings, I am. I try really hard.”
Though he admires the work of the New Hope Impressionists, he has taken his work to another level. His work is more complex than Impressionism out of his desire to depict species clearly with greater texture and detail.
“I’ve always admired them and felt an inevitable kinship because we’re tripping over the same stones and admiring the same vistas. Particularly, I deeply admire (Daniel) Garber’s vision and (Edward) Redfield’s grit. That said, I feel no desire to emulate them in subject matter or practice.”
In “Long Love,” the 42 x 54 piece pictured here, he depicts the Delaware Canal and River from the NJ side looking to PA just south of Bull’s Island. In the foreground we see the vibrant reds of euonymus or burning bush, an invasive species, next to the native blackjack oak. A tangle of bittersweet vines and wineberries join the fray. Sean added the additional branch in the upper left corner to balance the composition.
His forest floors are covered in a multitude of dead leaves. “I’ve painted millions of them, he said.” He even dubbed himself, “King of Dead Leaves,” and made a wooden sign proclaiming this title which hangs in his studio.
Thickets of hardwoods are often veiled in mysterious fog, as in “Two Hundred Years.” The 58 x 78 oil on linen painting was recently displayed in his solo show at the SFA Gallery in Frenchtown, NJ owned by artist John Schmidtberger. Inspired by a foggy walk on Bowman’s Hill, the title implies that the time period could be 200 years in the past or the future.
“There are no repeating forms in the painting,” Sean said. Dangling vines punctuate the composition and contorted tree branches grow at all angles, creating what he calls ‘hieroglyphics’. Small brushes, typically size 0, are used to capture the wispy branches.
The background is painted in varying shades of gray, letting the trees emerge gradually from out of focus to sharp. In all of his large landscapes he works from the background forward.
He paints from a huge, unlimited palette using several different blacks and pigments like brown pink and Madder brown for dead leaves. “I go through lots of palette knives,” he said. “They keep breaking on me.”
Sean is a direct painter in that he applies paint to create immediate results as opposed to building up layers and allowing them to blend together.
He paints plein air for color and value studies, but mainly paints in his Stockton, NJ studio where he references hundreds of photographs he’s taken while hiking. He paints every day, admitting that not every day is productive. When nothing works, he’ll take a walk. He listens to an array of musical genres while he’s painting including jazz, doom metal and classical.
He’ll often check his work by holding a mirror up to the painting or taking a photo of it with his phone. “I’ll know when I’m happy with the work if it doesn’t annoy me anymore.”
He’s painted a series of winter woods entitled “Epochal Violence,” referring to the ever changing landscape. The changes can be caused by man or nature and though time passes and damage heals, “There’s usually a scar,” he said.
One of these works was recently acquired by the Michener Art Museum in Doylestown. “It is the honor of a lifetime,” he said. “Epochal Violence 9: Querencia/Altar depicts a bramble similar to ones where Sean hid out as a child. Querencia is a Spanish word meaning sanctuary or place of comfort, while altar refers to the sacredness of natural surroundings. The painting took roughly five months to complete and is now part of the museum’s permanent collection.
He prefers painting woods in the winter and said, “You can see farther into the distance because there’s less humidity and no leaves.” Also, painting woods in summer is not as interesting because everything is green and overgrown.
Sean is equally adept at watercolors. During the Covid-19 outbreak, he painted a series of works called “Emotional Hideouts.” They consist of objects like toy dinosaurs, dragons and assorted tools that he’s arranged into inventive compositions.
A series of apples were painted from Manoff Market Cidery in Solebury, PA. Sean has called the watercolors “Apples Handed to Me by Gary Manoff.” Each apple is botanically perfect with its own distinctive marks. To lend a more contemporary look, he painted a thin vertical line above the apples suggesting they are falling through the air.
A Bucks County native, Sean was born in Doylestown and grew up in Solebury. He attended the George School and later Earlham College in Richmond, IN where he studied biology and literature. Always having an artistic bent, he dabbled in oils during high school and college.
After graduating from Earlham, he headed home and began a career in decorative painting, primarily home interiors. “Everything from mural painting to Venetian plastering,” he said.
Then in 2008 the stock market crashed along with his business. Seeking other work he took a test to join a scenic artist union and spent the next decade working in film and television in New York City. “They were long hours,” he said, “10-16 hour days.” He won three Art Director’s Guild Awards for his work on the TV show, “Mr. Robot,” and HBO’s “The Night Of.”
He’d take off summers to paint, amassing a body of work that enabled him to build his reputation as a fine artist. Though his work as a scenic artist was rewarding, he missed the woods he grew up in. In 2017 he moved to Lambertville, NJ where he currently lives with his wife Allison and daughter Marigold.
“I think of each of my landscapes as sort of a mirror. To depict the natural world faithfully in enough detail to mystify in its complexity, is to allow the viewer to see themselves. The painting is quiet because it’s so complicated that it doesn’t leave any questions. You bring your own questions.”
Sean takes commissions for portraits as well as landscapes that are in line with his work. His watercolor prints are sold at Farley’s Bookstore in New Hope and at Manoff Market Cidery in Solebury. To see more of Sean Mount’s work, visit www.seanmount.com.
Michele Malinchak is a freelance writer who has a degree in art and enjoys oil painting.