"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."