The work of Irish-American artist Sean Scully (b. 1945) is the subject of a large exhibit now touring the United States and Europe. It offers a good opportunity to see more than 60 paintings and works on paper by this important and influential artist.
Sean Scully’s work “belongs to the rich tradition of postwar American abstraction,” says Ned Rifkin, director of Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, and curator of the recently opened exhibit which features twenty years of Scully’s work.
However, Scully’s approach is different from that of most abstract painters. Where the quest for purity in painting has led to remoteness, Scully’s work is about content.
His style is often compared to that of Piet Mondrian. Like Mondrian, Scully is an immigrant to America, and also like Mondrian, his work is influenced by American music (jazz in Mondrian’s case, rhythm and blues in Scully’s case).
Scully says both his Irish roots and the fact that he is an immigrant have a bearing on his art. “Roots do have an effect on culture,” he says, adding that the “emotional life” of the Irish is very different from that of the English, which is one reason he was attracted to America.
He defines Irish culture as very emotional and with little idea of class. He sees contemporary English art as having a narrow “topographical quality,” both banal and morbid.
Being an immigrant, “your sense of place becomes different,” Scully says. “My sense of place has to do with my relationships.” Even when immigration is voluntary, as it was in his case, “you start out with something broken.”
Scully was born in Dublin. His family moved to London when he was four. While living in England, he studied art and worked in a commercial printing shop and a graphic design studio. He attended Harvard University on a fellowship from 1972-1973, and returned again to the United States on a fellowship in 1975. He became an American citizen in 1983, and maintains a studio in New York.
He decided to live in America because he identifies with American culture. “My spiritual life, when I was a teenager, was influenced by American rhythm and blues music,” he says, describing his art in terms that could also describe music: “My work is basically linear and rhythmic.”
The horizontal and vertical grid of Scully’s work brings to mind the streets and buildings of New York City. Similarly, many of his watercolors and drawings, both in color and shape, reflect trips he made in the 1980s to Berkeley, London, Munich, Madrid, and Mexico.
While the comparison to Mondrian comes easily, other artists’ influences on Scully are more subtle. Art critic Nancy Drysdale points out how often the patterns formed in Scully’s paintings resemble the intricate background patterns-such as wallpaper, carpeting and tablecloths-that Matisse used in his paintings.
Like many minimalist painters, he works primarily with horizontal and vertical lines, seeing in them a raw and elemental statement. Curved lines never appear in his art, and Scully rarely employs diagonal lines, he says, because “that’s not a primary form.”
A museum curator once told Scully that his works were disturbing, because geometric art should lead to order and equilibrium, and his works don’t. “That’s subversive rather than revolutionary,” Scully says.
He feels that art requires personal elements, including emotion. “My work is very much out of the self,” he says, adding that art should reflect identity, not theory. He finds much modern art soulless and uninspiring. “I èèwa
Several of his recent paintings have smaller separate canvases inserted as windows in the larger canvas. These works are about “the imposition of one reality inside another,” Scully says.
Another way that he breaks up the solid plane of minimalist painting, is by assembling canvases with several different planes, adding a cold, hard element to the paintings, which are sculptural in their effect, by inserting steel plates into canvases.
In several works on paper, Scully uses gouache like oil paint, creating sharply defined boxes and lines. And while many artists use watercolors for subtle effects, his watercolors, in contrast, have very rich colors. Watercolors, Scully says, “are about the extreme absence of physicality. They really are as close as a painter can get to pure light, an effortless, physically effortless vision.” Oil paint, on the other hand, he says, “has an outer skin and an entirely different presence on the canvas.”
Sean Scully: 20 Years, 1976-1995: Exhibition Dates:
At the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C. through September 10. At the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, October 10, 1995-January 7, 1996; Fundacio “la Caixa,” Centre Cultural, Barcelona, Spain, February 5-April 7, 1996; the Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland, May 23-August 24, 1996; and the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany, September 19-November 24, 1996.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the September/October 1995 issue of Irish America. ♦
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