Sean Scully Is an Art Star He ‘Won’t Bend the Knee for Anyone’
By Farah Nayeri
On a bright summer morning, the Irish-born artist Sean Scully interrupted a small watercolor for a conversation at his sunlit London atelier. The half-finished abstract rested on a trestle table among paint tubes and empty hummus tubs that they had been squeezed into.
Leaning against the walls were large new oils featuring colorful grids and stripes. Though abstract, they somehow evoked the rich scenery of North Africa; one was titled “Fez,” after Morocco’s second city.
Scully is showing several new paintings at the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery in Seoul as part of “Soul,” an exhibition that is to open on Tuesday, just before Frieze Seoul kicks off [...]
Scully was born in Ireland in 1945 and moved to London when he was 4, settling with his family in a slum. “It was absolutely dire,” he recalled that morning, in an interview at his studio.
The family soon moved in with young Sean’s loving and incredibly resourceful grandmother; he attended a Catholic school with strict but caring nuns. But when the family bought a house in south London, the little boy suddenly found himself in a vicious environment. “There was nothing except fighting, stealing cars, being in a gang and hoping not to get smashed up too often,” he said.
Young Sean became “the baddest boy in the school.”
“I disobeyed the law,” he said. “I walked on the wrong side going up the stairs and banging people.”
To an extent, that pugilistic side is still there, Scully acknowledged. “Our childhood selves remain,” he said. “I won’t bend the knee for anyone.”
In his teens, he became an apprentice in a printing workshop then a graphic design studio, discovered art, and never looked back. He attended art school in Croydon, in south London, embracing the experience “like somebody who had a religious calling,” then went to Newcastle University. While still a student at Newcastle, he drove a van down to Morocco — wanting to see what Matisse saw — and was entranced for life.
