John “Jack” McDonald, 84, co-owned funeral home

By DAVID LEE

HUDSON – The 19th Century Hudson River landscape painters were captivated by the views from the hills around Hudson. Perhaps the most renowned of them, Fredric E. Church, built his house on top of one of them, the view from which is famous enough that it has its own protected status as the Olana Viewshed. In 1880, another important Hudson River School landscape painter, Sanford Gifford, was buried in his family plot on the hillside of the Hudson City Cemetery on the high ground with its own fantastic viewshed looking east toward the Berkshires.
Now a new marble stone has been installed in that vicinity, the marker of Hudson artist Bill Sullivan who died in 2010. The stone itself, which stands within yards of Mr. Gifford’s, is carved in the same 19th century style and the same white marble as the other stones, but not yet tarnished with age. Mr. Sullivan painted many of the same scenes that his heroes Mr. Gifford, Mr. Church, and Thomas Cole saw, but accomplished them in the higher key of the late 20th century.
A ceremony was conducted on Saturday, July 1, to acknowledge the placement of the headstone and to commemorate Mr. Sullivan’s life. Artists and writers gathered from around the region, first at the Carrie Haddad Gallery on Warren Street in Hudson for introductions and conversation. Mr. Sullivan showed his work there and the gallery represents him.
Then the group moved up to the hillside and, as the clouds broke revealing a bright blue sky, people reminisced. In attendance were his close friend and partner, poet Jaime Manrique, who manages the estate; long-time friends Eugene Richie and Roseanne Wasserman whose Groundwater Press published the catalog for his 2006 retrospective at the Albany Institute of History and Art; David Kermani and Jeffrey Lependorf of Flow Chart Foundation which is modeled in the example of Hudson poet John Ashbery. Mr. Ashbery wrote the preface to the 2006 catalog: “With only a tinge of irony, Bill Sullivan makes new the vast spaces and swooning optimism of nineteenth-century Luminist painting.”
Film-maker Jacob Burckhardt, who met the artist in college in the 1960s, remembers how Mr. Sullivan took him in on one particularly misspent evening in New York City. Maybe because of his homelessness in early life, Mr. Sullivan was remembered as someone who took in people who had reached the end of their tether. And friend and artist McWillie Chambers said, “Bill was a presence in Hudson — everybody knew him.”
Brian Brunius, a friend, remembers that Mr. Sullivan was like a star struck teenager when he discovered the Mr. Gifford gravesite.

After Mr. Sullivan died, Mr. Manrique told Mr. Brunius that he wanted to purchase a gravesite and commission a gravestone to preserve Mr. Sullivan’s legacy and memory. Mr. Brunius then contacted the Gifford estate and acquired permission for Mr. Manrique to purchase a grave in their family plot and to commission, with the help of gifts from Mr. Sullivan’s friends, Hudson Monumental Works to create the historically consistent headstone.