BORN in 1945 in Dublin and raised in a south London working-class borough, Sean Scully has firmly established himself as one of the most important painters of our times. While a blues club he ran as an adolescent was swiftly closed up by the police, it left the abstract artist with a life long passion for music. Following a recent figurative detour from his life-long quest for the human factor in abstraction, he talks to Glass about his show at the Venice Biennale, how music continues to influence his work until today, and the need to further human understanding through art.
Portrait of Sean Scully painting in his Tappan, NY Studio in 2018
In your recent exhibition Sea Star at the National Gallery you embraced the late Turner as a deeply melancholic torchbearer of early abstraction. In fact, you have devoted an entire artistic life to demonstrating that abstraction and emotion are no opposites. Looking back at the struggle of artistic orthodoxies that have shaped the 20th century, how important do you feel are such dogmas in contemporary art?
Of course such abstraction became theoretical in the 1990s because abstract painters were looking for a way to make alliances with conceptual art. I myself, after what I did in the 1980s with abstraction, didn’t follow this line. At the outset of the 1980s, I had to put back into abstract painting what had been stripped away during minimalism. The development of advanced art had depended on subtraction for a very long time: beginning with the banishment of the figure and culminating with the paintings of Robert Ryman (a friend of mine), deleting the colour, leaving only the way you put the paint down. Which was a very beautiful idea.
I took it upon myself to reverse this process. I added relationship, metaphor, physicality and emotional surface in such paintings as Backs and Fronts, Heart of Darkness and Blame (a painting in which the several parts of the paintings were blaming each other for the discord and strange beauty in the work).
I also made a painting called Falling Wrong. I was more interested in what was wrong than in what was right. Thus it could also be considered as an attack on formalism and designed harmony. This I did to get at the new kind of reality, yielding beauty based on competing personalities, which seems very appropriate now since, particularly in America, all the sectors of society seem to be competing for space, consideration and airtime, with little consideration for each other.
Even now I make a painting like Shutter which is made up of four panels that seem to be sliced or cut by the brush strokes, as if the stripes are interfered with by a physical interruption, and then rejoined in discomfort. The four panels, which are painted with movement and feelings, are consigned to battle it out, while making another whole. The surface-object is split in the way film clips might be seen, creating great movement and confrontation, as the end of the stripes bang into each other. In other words, I have ideas in my paintings: windows, walls, diptychs etc.; but finally I am emotionally based.
As for movements, or groups that have common philosophies: I have a very flexible relationship to it. Obviously, for the time being, ideas of modernism have fallen over. This is because of the inclusion of more social groups, who all want to be heard. So the time we are in now might be called My Story, as opposed to Our Story. However, there are many overlaps, and I take it where I can find it. If somebody is using photography to make or assist painting, as I do with my Eleuthera paintings, and they come from an entirely different part of our planet, we might be in an exhibition together. Why not?
Opulent Ascension, 2019, Felt on wood
Your work at this year’s Venice Biennale is deeply concerned with questions of dualism, pathways from the physical to the spiritual. You also included figurative work, a Madonna Triptych, after decades of figurative abstinence. The display is staged at a holy place, San Giorgio, yet it is titled “human”. Do the figurative elements express a longing for humanism, for a vivid, living, spirituality?
My work is always concerned with dualism. And of course, the big sculpture in Venice has attracted some attention. It is enormous and powerful, but it is covered in felt. I have been using felt since I returned from Morocco in 1969. Felt is very interesting because it is not woven, it is pressed. With the sculpture in Venice Opulent Ascension, the felt takes all the height out of the huge church, so that it looks illuminated though it is not. When you go inside, the felt takes all of the sounds out of the air, so you are in a very quiet chamber. It becomes intimate and protective. To make a monument that is ascending and at the same time submissive in its skin is interesting to me.
As for the Madonna paintings, we found it irresistible to put three of them in a little chapel-like room at the end of a long corridor, that was full of abstract paintings. They, of course, establish a counterpoint. And they raise the question, “Why figuration?” after I spent a lifetime painting abstract. Well, first of all, I am not abandoning abstraction. I am painting my son and his mother, in a way that I hope makes them archetypal mother-child paintings. Since they are both so close to me, there was no other way to do it.
My father used to say, necessity is the mother of invention. So, it was necessary: because the subject is so compelling. It is also true to say that since I came out of extreme poverty and hardship, I have always had an unbreakable bond with the people on the street, and their reality. So while making abstract paintings that are ambitious, rigorous and austere, I have never been that abstract, or removed from life. My paintings, abstract or figurative, are quite physical, with surfaces that you can read by touching.
You once told me about the importance of music for you. How does it shape your working process? Are there musical artists or works that have been with you all your life?
Music is hugely important for me. My mother was a singer, and she was almost famous. As you know, I made the art for the Chapel of Santa Cecilia on Montserrat. Santa Cecilia is the Saint of Music, so it seemed like destiny that she would be such a big figure in my life. I am Irish, and Irish music with its relentless driving rhythm is as powerful and emotional as African music is for the people of Africa. Irish music expresses all the sorrows and refusal to submit that is embedded in the history of Ireland.
When I was a teenager I was a singer in a band for a short while, but I wanted to do something in painting, which I saw as more profound. I had a big relationship with the blues, Robert Johnson (When the train, it left the station, with two lights on behind, well, the blue light was my blues, and the red light was my mind) which is beautiful poetry. John Lee Hooker: Boom Boom Boom Boom could be the title of one of my paintings. I had a blues club for a while when I was 19, but it got shut down by the police.
I had a Jamaican uncle, and the relationship between Irish music and African music in Jamaica and the Caribbean generally is very powerful, because of the plantations. One result of this is tap dancing. So one could say that my childhood was saturated in music.
Bob Dylan has been with me all the way. He’s a great poet and songwriter. I love his sense of tradition and moral outrage, as in Masters of War. He wrote Shenandoah about crossing the great Missouri River, which I sing to my son every night as I put him to sleeping. I like Agnes Obel tremendously. She bridges the gap between the popular and the classical. When Oisin, my son, was seven, Lukas Graham wrote and sang Seven Years. And I listen to both of them every day when I paint.
Shutter, 2019, Oil on aluminium
How important is a sense of belonging for you? Are you seeking out places to create work, and do you respond to places?
My art is absolutely concerned with unification. The binding together of the world. Someone once asked me disparagingly if I wanted everybody in the world to be brown. And the answer is yes. I want an end to tribalism, in all its forms and disguises. This is because it has wrecked our world from top to bottom, and from East to West. People are constantly being divided into groups of one kind or another. Through race, religion, sex and location. And this is what is hurting us, and preventing us from seeing each other, from identifying with each other – and ultimately from pulling together.
Or, as one eloquent environmental scientist put it, there are no lines in the sky. Though even that is conceptually divided, when one nation claims “air space” over another. However, the material that fills our space was in somebody else’s air space the day before. I work towards human understanding, and if there is anything at all I can do to further that by exhibiting my work, I will. It’s important to share. It’s important not to invest in a single place, at the expense of another.
What can art give to the next generation while politics seem to fail?
Whether we will wreck our planet or not is still undecided. But one thing is for sure: the poor will suffer. And the more uncomfortable it gets, the more they will suffer, because they are on the front line.
The problems with politics is that if the politicians want to be elected, they are compelled to lie. Because if they don’t lie and make up fairy stories, we won’t elect them. Art testifies to our possibilities, our potential for creation, our amazing ability to imagine, and to imagine the opposite. It’s in a battle with the other, and always will be. That’s why fascists always kill the artists, because they want to murder imagination.
by Oliver Krug