‘The Vagabond Master of Abstraction’ Sean Scully interviewed by Hili Perlson
“My face is no longer symmetrical,” artist Sean Scully tells me halfway through our video call, possibly having studied his face in the little square on his screen. “That comes from emotions lived. I’m very emotional,” the Irish-born U.S. painter admits. Scully, who is 77, is sitting in his spacious studio in Palisades, New York with his dog Charlie, a rescue from the Bahamas, as his company in the light-washed space. I’ve been treated to a video tour of the sprawling garden earlier, where fruit trees and wild raspberries grow in abundance, and the skies are a calming luxurious blue. It’s hard to imagine why anyone would want to swap this for a bustling metropolis, but Scully, restless and on the move since early childhood, is preparing to relocate once again. He is moving with his wife and 13-year-old son back to London, the city in whose postwar slums he grew up from the age of four, amid the destruction of World War II. It’s a busy year for Scully; in addition to the transatlantic move —so that his son can grow up without the looming threat of gun violence— he is also preparing for a major exhibition in Houghton, England; the unveiling of a permanent public sculpture in London’s Hanover Square; and a museum show in Brest, France, slated for the fall. But that’s not to say that busy is an exception. Scully’s masterfully gestural abstractions of pulsating grid-like configurations have captivated the artworld since the beginning of his five-decade spanning career.
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?
Well, I wouldn't be able to have my kid at school here any longer. I can't. I just can't do it here because of the gun violence. So, I ended up with London, where I also have a studio, and which I find to be the most integrated and tolerant city in the world. And plus, the police don't carry guns.
You’ve made a series of paintings about gun violence in 2016, a visual mani- festo of sorts titled Ghost which features American flags in which the stars have fallen out and been replaced by firearms. It’s your most figurative work to date, and the only overtly political series I’m aware of.
I’m going to show these works in the museum in Brest this coming fall. You know, I showed these to a trustee of an American museum, it’s in the South, real cowboy land, where you can get shot if you’re not careful. And she said to me, I love these, but we could never show them in this museum. So is this the first time I did a work that is directly political in a way, and I immediately got censored. At least in parts of the U.S.
The exhibition Smaller Than The Sky by Sean Scully is on view at Houghton Hall, Norfolk until October 29, 2023.
