Nature Captured Through the Eyes of Sean Scully An interview with the artist

By Uiryung Park

I am sure you've probably been asked a million times… but on behalf of our Bazaar Art readers, I cannot but wonder: why stripes, blocks, and grids? I imagine the answer to that question may be rather simple and surely encompass many of your life experiences. 

So much of my artwork comes from my early life, I left school at 15 and became an apprentice typesetter. I also worked at a cardboard factory, stacking and sorting. It looked like my sculptures. 

But then I discovered night school. I don’t know why I did it. It was like getting religion. I got knowledge. I studied life drawing and I couldn’t draw very well in the beginning, but I studied like a person possessed, and I got really good at it. Then I discovered painting. It blew me away. There was something about it which made me kind of crazy when I looked at it. I just loved it so much. I wanted to be like them - Paul Klee, Matisse, Picasso, Derain, Monet, Cézanne, Manet. I wanted to be like Van Gogh, I wanted to be like Gauguin. I was a figurative artist. I wanted to be like those guys.

From Croydon, I went on to Newcastle University for a degree in Fine Art. Newcastle was seismic – Newcastle was incredible for me. I remember, one of my tutors there, Michael Brick, said to me, ‘Your gift is colour. Your problem is where to put it.’ It was like a eureka moment for me! In Croydon I’d discovered the joy of painting and found my artistic voice. In Newcastle I learned how to control it. I found my intellect and a sense of structure. Croydon was a fabulous school to go to. It was about instinctive painting, but after a while that kind of painting will fall in on itself. It won’t keep going. You’ve got to have something to pin it onto, and that was what I found in Newcastle – it had a strong intellectual rigor. If I painted expressionistically without structure, I would kill myself. It’s the structure that allows me to survive. I’m constantly working with a kind of emotional containment. It’s rather like a lion in a cage. There’s a tremendous physical dynamic about me, but it’s intellectually contained. 

Begun in 2013, Landline series evolved from architectural, brick-like structures to horizons and landscapes that echoed the natural world. May I ask what sparked this shift?

Well, the Landline painting relate to nature more strongly. As we’ve moved away from nature we have created a crisis of identity and it is an existential crisis, A survival issue. So now we have to turn back, make a U-turn, because by abstracting our relationship with nature we’ve made it more remote. So, what I’ve done with these paintings is move it more towards nature without giving up abstraction.  

I find it fascinating that you often combine the two different forms of your works in one frame. Can you tell us how you work with these series?

With my Wall Landline series, in which a Wall of Light is inset into a Landline, is a way of re-introducing the window. A window gives you two things at the same time, of course. It gives you an inside and an outside. Or an outside looking inside. So, basically, it is dialectic. And a lot of abstract painting has given that up, or at least, a lot of Minimal painting gave that up. So I put the window back in, as a way, as a substitute for a figure on a ground. 

Is there a reason you chose the title Soul for the Seoul exhibition? 

Of course, it does sound a little bit like Seoul. The Irish like to play around with words, which have allowed us to win three Nobel prizes for literature. We find words that are similar, that mean different things, to be fascinating. Bob Dylan thought words that sound the same mean the same, so that’s flattening out the difference between things. I think words that sound the same sometimes mean something entirely different. So I called my show Soul because my work does have soul. 

Lastly, may I ask how you would define your soul? 

Soul means your spirit. The only thing you really own is your spirit. Everything else is only rented, including your body. 

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