Madoo Conservancy Founder Robert Dash Dies

Robert Warren Dash, an artist and writer as well as the founder of the 2-acre Madoo Conservancy gardens in Sagaponack, has died.

“Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Robert Dash was a fixture in the New York gallery scene,” states the Mark Humphrey Gallery in Southampton. “His landscapes, like those of Fairfield Porter, manage to wed freely moving paint-as-paint with straightforward descriptions of the natural world.”

According to Ro Gallery, Dash was home schooled for most of his young life due to illness. Though he never formerly studied painting, he developed in interest in Abstract Expressionism, particularly Willem de Kooning.

“[De Kooning] was the one that taught me that paint does everything, and paint is art, the wielding of it, the manipulation of it; what it does. And paint is your deciding factor,” Dash said in a 1974 interview at his Sagaponack home for the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution.

He established Madoo in Sagaponack in 1967. Dash was also known on the East End as a longtime columnist for The East Hampton Star.

Check back for funeral information when it becomes available.