Today's Masters: Dual Nature

By: Dana Micucci

July 2008

"I’m constantly trying to create a senseof physical certainty in a slipping, sliding reality," Sean Scully says of his luminous paintings, which, in their captivating sensuality, call to mind the masterpieces of Gustave Courbet, an artist with whom Scully particularly identifies. Like Courbet’s, Scully’s paintings are "insistently manual and overtly physical," revealing the handprint of the artist in all of his humanity.

Unlike Courbet, however, Scully has chosen gridlike abstractions as his preferred visual language, finding inspiration in the orderly geometric canvases of Piet Mondrian and the Suprematist paintings of Kasimir Malevich and Olga Rosanova. Yet like his Romantic forebears, such as Caspar David Friedrich and J.M.W. Turner, he has infused them with an emotive force that is all too often missing from much of today’s art. In this sense, Scully’s paintings emanate a poetic, even transcendental, quality that exerts a mysterious power over the viewer, inviting ongoing examination and rumination. His virtuoso handling of color, texture, and composition recalls the works of masters as varied as Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne, and Edouard Vuillard, all of whom Scully admires. And both the gestural and meditative aspects of his art have an affinity with Abstract Expressionists such as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko, whom Scully has also cited as inspirations.

Indeed, to enter Scully’s paintings both thoughtfully and viscerally, as they demand, is to embark on a virtual tour through art history. It is this wide-ranging, integrative, and highly refined sensibility that allows Scully, who has risen to art-star status over the past three decades, to shift effortlessly between polarities—classic and contemporary, abstraction and Romanticism, order and emotion, certainty and uncertainty, the sensual and the sacred—in a way in which few contemporary artists have succeeded. He brings that same urgent dualistic impulse, and its accompanying desire for reconciliation, to a variety of other media, including prints, watercolors, pastels, photography, and sculpture, each of whose distinctive properties, he says, allow him to "express a range of emotions."

The Irish-born Scully, 63, who has been the subject of numerous international exhibitions, recently wrapped up a traveling show at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts of selections from the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s master set of his prints, the only set in a U.S. museum. In all of his work, the tension between physical certainty, conveyed through solid masses and textured layers of color, and the uncertainty evoked by the formal relationships of his bar, stripe, and checkerboard motifs, reveals the complex inner life of the creator. For in addition to his significant debt to art history, Scully also finds inspiration in the works of poets and writers such as T.S. Eliot and Joseph Conrad and in the more intimate domain of his memories, travels, life experiences and relationships.

"I’m trying to make paintings that are moving and emotive but not sentimental," says Scully, whose parents uprooted him from Ireland at age 4, when they moved to a working-class neighborhood in London after World War II, subsequently abandoning their Catholic faith, two pivotal traumas that affected Scully deeply. "My childhood was a disaster, an extended stay in Heartbreak Hotel. And my art fills a void for me, the void created by loss—loss of place, loss of religion, loss of country, loss of loved ones. It is my way of trying to find unity and a sense of place in the world. But my attempt at conveying certainty in my work is constantly undermined by its indefinite edges, elements that do not quite come together, and the strange colors I use, particularly gray, which is the quintessential color of uncertainty."

Scully knew he wanted to become an artist by the time he was 9. As a youth, he was inspired by the rich visual imagery of the Roman Catholic Mass, including the black, white, and red vestments worn by the priests, and by a school poster of Pablo Picasso’s "Child Holding a Dove" (1901), which he admired for both its tenderness and simplicity. After attending several art schools in London, he moved to New York in 1975, where he continues to live and paint. Early in his career, Scully taught at Princeton University and the Parsons School of Design in New York. In 1989 and 1993, he was nominated for the Turner Prize, which is presented annually by the Tate Gallery in Great Britain.

Having begun as a figurative painter in the tradition of Matisse and André Derain, Scully created his first abstract painting of intersecting bands and lines in 1970, after traveling to Morocco, where he was inspired by the stripes and colors of the country’s carpets and textiles. Op Art also influenced Scully, who used tape and spray paints in his early abstract gridlike paintings. In the late 1970s, he made striped paintings in black and gray, which show the marked influence of Minimalism and his friendship with painter Robert Ryman. By 1980, Scully says he was ready "to check out of the Minimalist club, because there is too much feeling in me to be contained by Minimalism."During a trip to Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula in 1983, he painted a watercolor inspired by the shifting light and shadows on the facades of ancient Mayan temples and ruins. Thereafter, his paintings became softer and less rigid, revealing his brushstrokes and an expressive layering of colors. This new aesthetic course laid the foundation for his renowned, ongoing "Wall of Light" series of paintings, prints, watercolors and pastels.

The tactile layers of paint in the "Wall of Light" paintings not only correspond to layers of information, feeling and time, they have a distinctive architectural quality, a consciously built solidity conveyed by their bricklike masses, which serve as a literal wall for the play of light. A "sad, falling light," as Scully, who is admittedly terrified of the dark, refers to it, seeps through and around these grids, competing with an obstinate darkness. For Scully, the grid itself is a deeply powerful, ancient symbol, which, in its inherent duality of horizontal and vertical, signifies the struggle between "the individual and the collective," self and other. "My work tries to hold these ideas in balance, and although I’m always striving for unity, I never reach the point of perfect wholeness," he says. "I never give up the personality. There’s always the danger that if you abandon yourself entirely to the collective, you lose something important."

While the cracks, divisions, and spaces between the bars of color in the "Wall of Light" series symbolize for Scully the perpetual uncertainty of the human condition, they also infuse his walls with "hope and possibility, suggesting that the walls are not impenetrable," he says. "Walls are what we use to construct our civilization, but they also create barriers and separation. I try to show that the walls can be overcome." These works also evoke various landscapes that have resonated with the itinerant artist, who maintains studios in New York, Munich, and Barcelona. And their woven surfaces hold memories of his childhood, when Scully says he "wanted to darn everyone’s socks," and his mother taught him how to knit.

In Scully’s work, scale and aesthetic relationships also convey meaning. His paintings, for example, range from the boldly monumental to the delicately small. "Some of the small paintings are so tender and intimate that they can affect you in a way that a big painting cannot," he says. Relationships between forms and colors, light and shadow, express his own deeply felt relationships with people and the natural world. Indeed, many of his works carry titles referring to loved ones, seasons, places, atmospheric conditions, and times of day.

Throughout his career, Scully has also constructed relationships within and between canvases, producing "inset" paintings, in which he embeds small canvases into larger ones, as well as paintings that incorporate two or more canvases bolted together. In another break with the painterly tradition, he is currently making large paintings on aluminum panels.

Scully has been a painter-pioneer from the very beginning. "In the late 1970s and ’80s, when he was emerging as an artist, people were saying that painting and abstraction were dead," says Jo Ann Moser, senior curator of graphic art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. "But Scully, along with artists such as Robert Ryman and Robert Mangold, revitalized abstract painting, showing that there was still much to be done with the medium. He doesn’t like to think of his work as completely abstract, however, because it is so loaded with emotional meaning." In his emotionality, honest vulnerability and cultural complexity, Scully shares a kinship with painters like Cy Twombly and Luc Tuymans. Yet in his desire to create art that "feeds off the world of the senses," he transcends that world. "There is something inconsolable in the artist that makes him create," Scully says. "The artist has to find a way to expose his wound while transforming it into something sublime. Art has to become a bridge of experience for others, a bridge to something bigger than ourselves."

In his quest for unity, Scully has be queathed us a profound beauty. His courageous voyage into his own universally human heart of darkness reveals hopeful glimpses of light. For he has imbued his art with an aspiration for what T.S. Eliot, in his poem "Four Quartets," calls "the still point of the turning world."

Galeria Carles Tache, Barcelona
011.34.93.487.8836

Galerie Lelong, New York
212.315.0470, galerielelong.com

LA Louver, Venice, Calif.
310.822.4955, lalouver.com

Timothy Taylor Gallery, London
011.44.20.7409.3344, timothytaylorgallery.com