Robert Dash had no formal training in art, yet he is a noted landscape painter with works in major museums and collections. He had no training in horticulture, yet his property is a destination for gardeners from around the world. He certainly had no training in interior design, yet he has created an environment—to call it décor would be a reduction, and perhaps in his eyes an insult—that is sensual and beautiful. And in all of these areas what he has done is unique. “What I do is instinctive, impulsive—invented,” Dash says of his accomplishments.
What started in 1966 as an undistinguished piece of farmland on Sag Main Street in Sagaponack, with an abandoned 1740 double-sectioned barn, built with shipwreck timber, and historic outbuildings, is now Dash’s quite personal home: a summer house, a winter house, studios, and a living encyclopedia of lavish gardens. The structures are surprisingly small in square footage on today’s standards, but you’d never know it. And no one experiencing the complexity and variety of plants and features along the paths and can believe the site is a mere two acres. I would have estimated six.
Dash, as a young man, started painting abstracts but soon moved on to landscapes. The logic of this, given his love of plants and nature, seems obvious to an observer now. Then again, maybe we have grown to associate his name with the beautiful scenes in his exhibitions in museums and galleries. His current work veers a bit toward abstraction without losing its naturalistic roots. “The earth got smaller and the sky got bigger,” he says. He describes newer paintings with internal frames or based on a single curve as cerebral—a word that might well apply to all his undertakings.
His use of color, for example, is both sensuous and cerebral, most apparent in the way he paints and repaints the interior and exterior of the structures on the property. These are not the fashionable and predictable and proper colors you find on the shelves of Benjamin Moore. Dash mixes them himself and they range from the mysterious to the vibrant and assertive. He likes chartreuse because it is the color of young foliage in the spring (but never use green he says), mauve because it was Monet’s color, and firecracker red because it excites him. The thought of some of these colors on the trim of eighteenth century structures seems outlandish, but when you see it there is a surprising harmony and wholeness as well as originality. Who would have guessed there was such unflinching, aberrant beauty in these colors? Well, Dash did.
The reason for his having a winter house and a summer house was practicality: his original house was too hard to heat, so he created another house in one of the historic structures. But the two houses suit his life. “I like the changes,” he says. “The winter house looks out on a geometric garden that is beautiful all year. The summer house is a garden.”
Connecting two antique parts that comprise the summer house is a fifty-foot long passage lined with gardening books—another remarkable collection in Dash’s small universe of collections. Dash reads and writes extensively. Walls of his summer bedroom are hung with a collection of framed poems by friends and houseguests, many of whom are, unsurprisingly, important poets such as John Ashberry. Dash writes a gardening column for the East Hampton Star that, like Dash himself, is cultivated, enlightened and elegant. It encompasses art and literature, and is just old-fashioned enough to make you think you think of garden writers like Vita Sackville-West.
The winter house is basically one large room with kitchen, sitting area and dining area, but dominated by a large bed built of tree branches. Dash plays with color and form in the room, just as he does in the garden. The lacquered organic shapes of the bed are set off against black on black stripes.
The gardens play with our sense of space using boxed rooms, enclosed areas, and garden tableaux, but also with vistas and man-made features like ponds, and gazebos. Radical pruning—including training privet into tree forms—lures us into little known places. The ginkgo groves in particular create an unforgettable sense of place.
And they distort our sense of time, becoming a world in itself, where time exists not as a linear concept but according to seasons and the maturing of plants and trees, to light admitted or denied based on foliage and one man’s shaping of nature. Time becomes layered, even fluid, as we enter the silence of an exedra, Dash’s version of a 5th century Greek demi-lune, or view four quincunx beds based on Xenophon’s description of a garden in ancient Persia.
The gardens and the homes of Robert Dash are more than conventional pretty stuff: this is a personal, even occasional quirky vision of the world, drawing us closer to the sublime.
The Madoo Conservancy, the gardens of Robert Dash, hailed in numerous books and magazines, is open to the public on selected days. For information see www.madoo.org, or call 631 537-8200.