‘The Vagabond Master of Abstraction’ Sean Scully interviewed by Hili Perlson

What brought you to Upstate New York in the first place, and how has the local landscape influenced your paintings?

I moved up here from New York City about ten years ago, I didn’t want to raise my son in the city. But the thing about suburbia is that everything is a solid B. Intellectually, imaginatively, visually. And everyone is woke, while I’m not. But back to your question, there's a kind of argument about my work, whether it's urban or not. I have people who see landscape in my work, but others argue vehemently that it’s urban.

What would you say it is?

I grew up extremely rough, you know. In Ireland, we lived with the travelers be- cause we were homeless, and they took us in. Then we went to London and lived in slums after the war. Our playgrounds were all bomb sites, because 12% of London was bombed. Bomb sites made for very nice playgrounds! It was full of rubble, and you could climb over it. And one thing that I always remember about them was that in all the bomb sites there were zinc wood tanks—in those days, they used to have the water tank at the top of the house. And now, I make sculptures out of them. I looked for salvaged tanks, they’re still around. I just made these kind of stacked, fitted sculptures that look just like my paintings. They look as if, you know, as if Mickey Mouse said, “Let’s make a sculpture out of your paintings.”

Does working on these sculptural pieces take you back to your childhood?

Oh yeah, I’m completely stuck in the past. All my artworks come from going to work in the print factory when I was 15, where I was an apprentice typeset-ter [Scully points at one of his abstract paintings with staggered multicolored shapes, resembling the letters set into a monotype system.] I also worked at a cardboard factory, stacking and sorting. It looks like my sculptures. I think I was preparing myself in some way even before I went to art school. It’s one of those things you realize much later, looking back. We sometimes know what’s right for us, but we don’t know yet why. This kind of energy is very interesting to me, how we know things before we are conscious of them. I had a difficult relationship to my parents and when I went to art school, I could do so because I was independent, I had been working for all those years and paid taxes. I had been preparing.

You’ve experienced success as an artist very early on, almost straight out of school. How has that shaped your work throughout the years?

You know, Albert Einstein, who I admire very much and who taught at Princeton like I did, so I feel like we're colleagues, said the only people who never make mistakes are the people who do nothing. I think that encapsulates the experience of being a creative person very well. I made my big breakthrough in the 1980s, my first show out of London was in L.A. in the mid-70s. Around that time everyone in L.A. followed artist Lita Albuquerque, and there were a lot of painters around that I liked. What connected art in London with Los Angeles was the phenomenological nature of painting and sculpture, which was light based: Larry Bell, Joe Goode, and in London, of course, Bridget Riley and myself. It was a bigger connection than to New York.

How would you explain that? It makes little sense to me, I can’t think of two cities that are more dierent, culturally and otherwise.

I think that in New York art at the time there was a certain brutality that expu- nged light eects, which were seen as not fundamental to structure but rather connected in some way to pleasure and nature—and New York Minimalism expunged nature. We know for example that Agnes Martin left New York to deal with the light in New Mexico. And my work was very connected to L.A. Sometimes I say I should have moved there instead of to New York and then people always reply “But then you wouldn't have done what you did in 1982.” That’s when I made a series of breakthrough paintings where I banged things together and made inserts. What I did was to bring in the aggressive painting. I broke with opticality, to put it's simply.

There’s also another important location in your life: Germany, where you teach and have a home in Bavaria, and a studio in Berlin.

I think that the Germans reacted as they have to my work because it represents extreme structure and extreme emotion simultaneously. It is deeply dialectical. You know, Jürgen Habermas [the German philosopher and social theorist] wrote text on me. I'm the only artist, he has ever written on. My work is not impactful in the way that Andy Warhol’s or Frank Stella’s is. It has contradictions and difficulties, it has a double view. If I go to the Whitney Museum and there's an Andy Warhol retrospective on and the elevator door opens, I don’t need to get out. I can see the whole exhibition from there.

How do you feel about returning to London after all these years?

The exhibition Smaller Than The Sky by Sean Scully is on view at Houghton Hall, Norfolk until October 29, 2023.