Sandell Blends Art and Science in Sailmaking Ventures

Anyone who has ever sailed competitively knows there’s a science to the sport — it requires precision and athleticism, and the ability to make the right calculations based on the conditions of the day.

A sailor’s skill, however, is only part of the equation. To make the most of what he or she knows, the equipment has to perform.

That’s where Scott Sandell comes in.

The Sag Harbor resident has been sailing nearly his entire life, and what he has learned, and indeed has known for a long time, is that when it comes to sailing, and in particular fine-tuning a vessel to allow it to operate at peak performance, a combination of science and art is the best recipe for success.

Sandell is an artist by trade but has been on the water for much of his life, after following in his older brother’s footsteps and becoming a sailing instructor at a summer camp as a youth.

“He took me out, and I was scared stiff, but I thought it was great,” Sandell recalled with a laugh in a recent interview. “I’ve been sailing since then.”

For years, Sandell has been combining his love for and expertise in sailing with his passion for making art, and the most notable way that has taken shape is in the form of sailmaking. Sandell has long used sailcloth as a medium for his art, making hand-sewn sculptures out of the material, and also had a background in art education that made it a natural fit for him.

When studying painting at the University of Minnesota, Sandell had a printmaking professor who inspired him, and opened his eyes to the “process-oriented” methods for that medium. He sees a natural symmetry in sailmaking, he said.

Several years ago, sailmaking became somewhat of a necessity rather than simply an enjoyable job or pursuit.

Sandell has been a member off and on at Breakwater Yacht Club in Sag Harbor for years and, back in 2007, was part of a local fleet that sailed out of the waters next door to Breakwater in Europe dinghies, the class of boat used in the Olympics. Friends and other novice sailors who became interested in sailing joined the fleet but struggled to sail successfully on the lightweight Europe dinghies. So the group made the decision to switch to the more user-friendly Sunfish.

It was, Sandell says, a “big mistake” in hindsight.

“It was like if you rode a bicycle that was a racing bike, and is really light and responds to every move when you’re on the bike, and then switch to a fat tire bike with one speed and streamers on the handlebars,” he said. “Pretty much, we all hated it.”

In an attempt to put some fun and performance back into the mix, Sandell started redesigning sails for the Sunfish. He worked with New London-based sailmaker Kevin Farrar, and while they made some improvements, and the new sails helped, “it was still a Sunfish underneath,” Sandell said.

Boatmaker David Clark then joined the effort, designing a boat called the Rocket during the pandemic. Combined with Sandell’s sails, the fleet was back in the kind of action it desired again.

Sandell’s sails are both high-performance pieces of essential sailing equipment and pieces of art. They’re built out of high-tech laminate fabrics, with a scrim of Kevlar or carbon fiber sandwiched between two layers of mylar.

“The fabrics look really cool,” he said, adding there is choice when it comes to the fabrics he can use. “They all have different characteristics, different weights.”

It’s clear he enjoys the challenge and precision that making high-performance sails requires.

“You have to create a 3D shape using cloth that comes off a roll that’s flat,” he explained. “It’s like making a dress: You have broad seams, you cut a curve into one piece, sew it into flat pieces, and suddenly you have a shape. It has to perform, so you want something that will sail upwind really fast. The regular Sunfish sails just look like a bedsheet.”

While Sandell says he is “really quite happy just being an artist,” he has been drawn in by the challenge of tweaking a design to make improvements over time, which he said speaks to his artist’s nature.

After agreeing to make sails for people in his sailing crew, the popularity of what he makes has grown. Now, Sandell can be found spending time splaying out his materials on the kitchen floor of the home he shares with his wife, Cathy Creedon. He joked that his work has jeopardized plans for a kitchen renovation that included a center island countertop.

It takes him roughly a week to make a sail. The work starts in his studio before moving to the kitchen.

“The panels I can cut in the studio on long tables, but eventually I have to lay the panels out on the floor,” he said. “It works really well, except there’s a limit to how long you can leave them out before the person you live with wants to make dinner.”

Sandell has been sailing officially at Breakwater since 2016 and said he loves the club and its community-minded, inclusive approach to the sport. He races on Sunday mornings with a group of about 12 sailors, all of whom he said have abandoned the Sunfish for the Rockets, which bear his sails.

“It’s a broad spectrum of people, but I say that it has a lot of art-focused professions in our group,” he said.

They’re the kind of people who can appreciate what Sandell has done with sail design from both a creative and performance point of view.

Farrar, the New London sailmaker, has known Sandell for more than 40 years, after meeting him at Block Island race week in 1980, when Farrar was working at his own sail loft and Sandell was working for another sailmaker. They’ve collaborated on concepts for sails many times.

He spoke about what makes Sandell’s work unique.

“He’s clearly an artist first, and sailmaking is part art and part mathematics,” he said. “But he’s a very creative person and always has been.

“Some of the sails he’s been making for boats out there, I don’t know if whimsical is the right word, but they’re very cool,” he added. “He has great ideas.”

Nick Gazzolo is a sailor at Breakwater and expressed his admiration and awe at what Sandell achieves both as an artist and fellow sailor.

“Scott is a two-fisted maker in his art and his sailmaking,” Gazzolo said. “Many people figure out how to do something and then keep repeating it. I have known Scott for almost 20 years, and he never does the same thing in his art or his sailing. He’s always figuring out how to make a thing better.

“I have seen him take boats that other people left for dead and then he makes them beautiful,” Gazzolo continued. “I am just trying to drink enough coffee to get my boat rigged each week, and Scott is showing up with a gorgeous new sail that he made on his kitchen floor.”

Gazzolo shared insight into his friend’s personality and his approach to his work and sailing that sum up the essence of who he is and how he approaches both his work and the sport he has loved since he first went out on a sailboat with his brothers as a teen.

“Cotton is usually a very bad idea for sailing, because it’s very absorbent and makes you cold,” Gazzolo said. “Everyone else has all their fancy sailing apparel, Gore-Tex and various synthetics. Scott always just wears 100 percent cotton, a button-down shirt, and jeans or shorts. It’s no problem for Scott, because his sailing is so graceful that he never goes over or even gets wet.

“It’s like a person doing The New York Times crossword in pen,” Gazzolo added. “The audacity inspires both admiration and envy.”

While he did not necessarily expect to be making performance sails at this point in his career, Sandell has appreciation for the experience.

“It became this platform for creativity,” he said. “The whole fleet did — we sailed the Rockets as a development class, with just a few rules, so you can come in with almost anything and try it.”