Eric Fischl Taps Into the Sag Harbor Ragamuffin Parade for Artistic Inspiration

Halloween. It’s that time of year when new identities abound and people are given permission to be whatever they’d like — maybe something they’ve always wanted to be or perhaps even something they fear.

It turns out that Halloween, and specifically the Sag Harbor Ragamuffin parade, has not escaped the attention of North Haven artist Eric Fischl. Currently on view at Skarstedt Gallery in New York City, “Eric Fischl: Towards the End of an Astonishing Beauty: An Elegy to Sag Harbor, and Thus America,” is a collection of seven paintings by Fischl inspired by the annual parade in Sag Harbor.

But as anyone familiar with his work might expect, these paintings are not simply a documentation of a beloved small town tradition and rather than presenting an orderly lineup of costumed residents marching gleefully en masse on Main Street, Fischl’s compositions capture a different view of the parade — one marked by the exhaustion and confusion that comes at celebration’s end as the group is beginning to disperse.

“I have never really painted where I live,” admitted Fischl during a recent interview at The Church, the artist’s space he and wife April Gornik recently created in a former Methodist church. “This is the first time in my life I’m attaching myself specifically to here and looking at something that is happening here.”

And what’s happening in Fischl’s paintings of the Sag Harbor Halloween parade represents a confluence of varying motives and emotions. As the United States emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic, and people who have grown used to isolation emerge in a cautious attempt to return to a prepandemic normal, there is a certain disjointedness and absurdity in it all. And naturally, the presence and metaphor of the mask cannot be ignored, nor viewed in the lighthearted way in which it may have been in the past.

“I took photographs of the parade for many years. Probably beginning in the late 1990s,” Fischl explained. “Of course, in 2020 with COVID, they didn’t do the parade. Then in 2021, they did, which was interesting because a lot of the costumes had the death theme. You’d have the beaked masks from the plague, and it just has a new meaning.

“Halloween is supposed to have something to do with death, I suppose, but this was moving into Day of the Dead kinds of fantasies,” he said. “Then there were people on canes and crutches, some who were probably literally the walking wounded. I had taken these photos for years and was always charmed by the parade, but I never knew what to do with it, until now. It’s not just that it was a COVID meditation, but a combination of these years of profound stress, this high anxiety about the future of everything from the fragmentation of America, the anger, that madness.

“This thing sort of culminated in this apotheosis of terrific stress, a town that feels like it’s going to be lost,” he said. “I understood how I could use it. Paint a parade and people trying to figure it out. It’s the other side of fun — the aftermath.”

Fischl noted that one of his favorite paintings in the series is also the simplest.

“It’s two people, a woman looking like she’s off to yoga in her tights and T-shirt with her mat and coffee, and she’s looking at this person walking by in what seems to be a Pink Panther costume with the hood pulled back,” he said. “You see the person in there. I thought it was a woman and some thought it was a guy, and someone thought it was Kurt Cobain. But it’s two people with two different purposes of the day, one is off to do a workout and be fancy, and the other is totally exhausted, perhaps having to harness all the kids in the parade.”

Though they may feel familiar and true to life, none of the scenes depicted in Fischl’s paintings are actual renditions of reality as it occurred. Instead, they are composites collaged from various imagery that he captured through his photographs.

“They all have a kind of storyline and intentionality to them. One is a parade of people who are mostly wounded on crutches and canes. There’s a drummer boy bleeding with a look on his face that’s fabulous,” Fischl said. This particular work is catching the group on the way back after the parade. Hopefully, it was pleasure for them. But right now they’re exhausted and wounded and moving back up the street.”

Behind it all, there lurks a deeper truth that speaks to a nation in a time of uncertainty as the country dissolves into partisanship and the suspicion of the other grows. It’s a divide that Fischl maintains has been with us for most of this century.

“I think a lot of American behavior comes out of 9/11 because 9/11 destroyed the myths we had about ourselves,” he said. “We thought everybody loved us, and we thought we were the good guys. We thought we were invincible. All of those things, and that America, crumbled in front of us along with the buildings and the people who died that day. It threw us off balance. Now it’s about the balancing act.”

That balancing act may have overtones of national identity, but Fischl noted that it also represents the micro, and his paintings hint at the story of Sag Harbor itself, a village on the verge of deciding what it will become in its next incarnation.

“It’s what’s going on in this town in terms of trying to figure out how to become prosperous without overdeveloping or ruining the character of the place,” he said. “What I have is the constant feeling that this isn’t going in the right direction. This town has profound mixed feelings of what it is, what it could be, what it should be and what it used to be.

“From day one, it’s gone through cycles of boom and bust. The character of the Sag Harborites is resilience. They prosper when it’s prosperous, and they hang in when it isn’t,” he said. “The thing is, it’s never been dependent upon one industry, but one industry at a time, whether it was lunar landing parts, torpedoes, watches or silverware.

“My view of life is that it’s essentially comic/tragic. The comedy relives us of the stress and pain of the essential tragedy of being alive,” he added. “I think these paintings have that. There’s something where you feel in the whole moment you can understand it both ways.

“I think small town America represents and has always represented the authentic values we place on the myth of America itself. A positive sense of community, that there are neighbors who help each other, a sense of a pride in place in things that we do for ourselves and for each other. It’s a tangible way that we are connected that makes it feel it’s a positive life.

“In my title — ‘Towards the End of an Astonishing Beauty,’ the astonishing beauty to me is that construct — the greatness of America is within these optimistic values and purposes that are constantly at the point of having to be reasserted, but there’s a value there,” he said. “It’s a place at the edge of losing its identity, and because it is, America is. They’re connected in such a profound way.

And, he noted, ultimately every town and community in the country has the right to assert its significance to the American dream.

“In this case, it was a way of making that point. That’s the struggle,” Fischl said. “How can we revitalize something and have a positive sense of the future? What I do have is a belief that the only way we’re going to save the country is by fixing what we can fix locally.”

“Eric Fischl: Towards the End of an Astonishing Beauty: An Elegy to Sag Harbor, and Thus America” runs through October 29 at Skarstedt, 20 East 79th Street, New York. For more information, visit skarstedt.com.