ArtTalk – Sean Mount

Our guest, Sean Mount, is a self-taught oil and watercolor painter, and a naturalist who has been foraging for mushrooms, in particular, all his life. Ornithology is of specific interest to him, too. Known for his paintings of foggy winter woods and sun-dappled creeks, his work builds on the rich legacy of New Hope School Impressionism with honesty and innovative unsentimentality.

Sean received a 2019 fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. After a career as a decorative painter and muralist, he spent a decade in New York City working in film and television as a scenic artist. There, he won three Art Director’s Guild Awards for his work on "Mr Robot"  and The Night Of."

“In 2024, there is nothing more important in painting than standing in our landscape with strength and honesty. I walk through young forests choked with invasive plants that were fields just eighty years ago. I climb over the rims of colonial quarries. This wilderness is a changing array of scars from previous afflictions. It is familiar to us as we explain ourselves through houses and roads and shows and events. It is everything else—our negative space. Mystery is worth describing. There is Awe.” –Sean Mount