Stlukesguild

Sean Scully



Perhaps the single most important champion of the merits of abstract painting in the last couple of decades has been the transplanted Irishman, Sean Scully. Scully was born in Dublin in 1945 and moved to England in 1949. He studied art in London, Newcastle, and Harvard. He began his career as a figurative painter in the manner of the German Expressionists, but his career took a defining shift in direction following his exposure to a retrospective of the work of Mark Rothko in London:



Rothko opened up Scully to the possibility that simple abstract forms, color, and the artist's touch could convey deep emotional content. Scully would never return to figurative work again.

Other major sources of inspiration would be the geometric abstract work of Paul Klee:



the Abstract Expressionist, Robert Motherwell's early painting, Little Spanish Prison:



and the art of his Irish/English heritage. Siting the Insular or Hiberno-Saxon illuminated manuscripts...



as well as Durham Cathedral...



Scully suggested a native affinity for pattern.

The basic unit of his work became... and has remained... the stripe. Scully's earliest abstract paintings were rooted in hard-edged Minimalism... a style current at Harvard during his post-graduate studies. He constructed these paintings using acrylic paint and taped off the edges in order to assure himself of absolute perfection:



He soon grew unsatisfied with these paintings as to his mind they lacked the sense of the human touch that he so admired in the paintings of the old masters... as well as in the work of Rothko which had so inspired him. Scully also began to look at the world around him following his move to New York, and he became fascinated with the haphazard relationships he saw between buildings slapped up next to each other. He admitted, "I see a sort of urban romance in the makeshifts people use to keep a place like Manhattan together." He began to take close notice of these and to document them... as well as similar scenes found during his visits to Mexico, North Africa, and Spain... in photographs:





From this inspiration he began to envision his paintings as echoing these architectural relationships. The paintings themselves were often constructed of multiple panels... some having greater or lesser depth so that they asserted themselves in an almost sculptural relief manner:



The artist also began to employ inserts... a separate painting within the larger painting... building upon Motherwell's Little Spanish Prison. Along with the increased physicality of the painting surface or constructions, the artist began to utilize an increasingly physical/sensual handling of paint. Scully returned to the use of oils and embraced an imperfection of line. Scully speaks of intending the pigment to "tremble and breathe". He speaks of the imperfections or indefinite handling of paint as suggesting something human. He declares, "The later Titian also possesses this indefiniteness, this blurry quality of his figures as if they were all to disintegrate... The other artist that I have loved very much is Monet... particularly the Cathedrals. Because it is like stone melting."

This connection with Monet's Cathedrals should not be surprising considering that Scully began to see his paintings... again in light of Mark Rothko... as expressing something spiritual: "I believe with elemental forms painted from deep within the self, it is possible to make something empathetic that addresses the architecture of our spirituality." He began to conceive of his paintings as icons... altarpieces... reliquaries... yet of an uncertain spirituality and an indefinite religion. The contrast between the bold solidity of the forms and the quivering human touch of the paint handling was intended to convey something of the ambiguity... the indecision... the indefiniteness of spirituality in our time. This intention is neatly summed up in the poetic image of Nietzsche's well-known to the artist:

"Here one can scarcely help but admire man's genius as an architect who succeeds in erecting an infinitely complex cathedral of concepts on shifting foundations, a cathedral built, as it were, on water. However, with foundations such as these, the building has to be like a spider's web: delicate enough to float on the tide, but strong enough to resist being torn apart."

The titles Scully began to employ (Cathedral, Raphael, Gabriel, Maesta, Magdalena, White Robe, Angel) made Scully's spiritual aspirations even more obvious to an audience.





Scully is deeply enamored of color and his paintings are often built up of endless layers of paint... the sub-strata shimmering through the final layers. His color choices are often indebted to color relationships in various paintings by old masters... but they are also selected for their emotional impact... whether it be blanched off-whites and grays... or blood reds.



The scale of the works also adds to the content... forcing the artist to confront the work on an almost architectural scale and struggle with it like a carpenter constructing a wall...





... and surrounding... enveloping the viewer.

Scully's most recent work forms a series that the artist refers to as the Wall of Light. These paintings bearing the marks of thick brushstrokes and broad gestures, manifest dense, yet luminous, surfaces. The most recent ones are looser, more open and fluid. The artist often employs a broad array of grays and earth-tones inspired by works by old masters such as Velasquez and Modernist painters such as Giorgio Morandi. At the same time, Scully began to bring in hues rarely seen in his paintings: various blues, lavenders, roses, etc...









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