Ross Bleckner's home in Sagaponack, N.Y., was once owned by Truman Capote. Mr. Bleckner expanded the once-modest footprint of the home twice and added a pool to the five-acre property. More Photos »
Published: July 24, 2013
All was quiet at Ross Bleckner’s house last week, if you didn’t count the four yappy dachshunds gnashing their teeth in a downstairs window. Strange, because the renowned artist had an appointment to show a reporter around the place.
An hour passed. The sun intensified. Still no sign of the homeowner.
Then a tall man was spotted in the distance, trimming trees. He explained that Mr. Bleckner was in his studio, at the far, wild end of the property, accessible by a path cut into waist-high grass.
Indeed, Mr. Bleckner was inside, working feverishly on a large-scale painting in the morning heat.
“Oh, you’re here,” he said in a high, scratchy voice. “I forgot all about our meeting.”
He worked a brush quickly back and forth on the canvas. “What is this article about, again?”
Your home.
“Oh. Well, what do you want to know?”
In the early ’90s, Mr. Bleckner paid $800,000 for Truman Capote’s old beach house, which sits on five cloistered acres here on the East End of Long Island, a short walk from the ocean. Over 20 years and two major renovations, he has taken a little two-story, box-shaped dwelling and added wings, a pool and the art studio. He expanded the guesthouse, too, and repaired and winterized the whole place.
“I had to,” Mr. Bleckner said. “It was falling apart.”
He was happy to show the home, he said, but he needed to use this fresh paint before it dried. He works on several groups of paintings at the same time, he said. The one in front of him, a dark canvas layered with ghostly white and red dots, was part of his brain-scan series: “They go from very calm to schizophrenia. This is not calm. This is plaque.”
Mr. Bleckner is friendly, quick-witted, curious and well read. He is not, however, prone to lengthy digressions about decorating or his domestic life. Nor does he exhibit much interest in the lore surrounding the previous owner.
Did Mr. Capote do a lot of entertaining here?
“I don’t know,” Mr. Bleckner said.
Do you?
“No.”
Mr. Bleckner said he uses the home as a summer retreat, and relishes the quiet. Noise was one of the main reasons he sold his longtime home in the city, a loft building in TriBeCa whose ground floor once held the Mudd Club.
“Every time you turned around someone was tearing down a building,” he said. “If you want quiet, you need to be in a place that is deeply established architecturally.” (He moved to the West Village, where he still lives most of the time.)
Eventually, the morning’s work was completed, and Mr. Bleckner walked through the football-field-size yard and up to the main house.
In Mr. Capote’s day, the home was filled with books and tchotchkes, and decorated with yellow stuffed chairs, pillows and animal skins. Mr. Bleckner, it quickly became apparent, is not Mr. Capote. Though he shares the home with Eric Freeman, an artist who lives here year-round and designed the space, the rooms looked barely lived in.
The living area had very little furniture or art. The kitchen was showroom-neat. Upstairs, in the master suite that Mr. Bleckner added (Mr. Capote used a tiny sleeping loft), a Zen-like sparseness prevailed. A wooden shelf held a simple framed photo of Mr. Bleckner’s mother, who died in 2008. The main attraction was not inside but out the windows, where a beach and white-capped water were tantalizingly visible in the distance.
Still, Mr. Bleckner was anxious about the potential for personal revelation. “You see a lot when you come into someone’s room,” he said. “Even when you don’t see a lot, you see a lot.”
He picked up a copy of the New York Review of Books on a low table. “You can see what I read,” he said, mock scandalized.
Back downstairs, Mr. Bleckner said he would probably pick up a sandwich for lunch and spend the rest of the afternoon in his studio, followed by a late swim in the ocean.
Asked if he was happy here, he smiled and replied, simply, “Yes.”