Sean Scully: meeting the painter to ask about his art Can you ever truly understand an artist?
By Michael Donald
I have never understood abstract art. I imagine like most of those around me I stand in front of paintings wondering what I am meant to feel. It was during lockdown in 2020 that I came across a series of paintings by the artist Sean Scully called “A Kind of Red”, which changed my view.
The five paintings consist of horizontal and vertical blocks of burgundy, black, and grey. I am completely transfixed by them. I can’t articulate what I feel, but I am deeply moved, and over the next few months, and then years, I keep coming back to them. This wasn’t some kind of epiphany – I didn’t suddenly “get it”, or see behind the curtain. The emotions I felt raised more questions than they answered. For one thing, why do the paintings make me feel anything at all?
I’m a photographer so I can only ever take a picture of what is in front of the camera – what’s already there. As with the impressionists, the expressionists and all the great figurative artists over time, there was always something in front of them, something that is seen, that already exists, something that is there for people to compare the work to. With abstract art there is nothing in front of you. So what is happening? What is it that you are painting? And why should anyone feel anything at all looking at the finished work? I decide to seek out Scully to try to find some answers.
So here I am, five years later, sitting across from him in his Hampstead house. It’s just by the heath. It’s spartan, there’s not much on the walls, but he’s never really lived here. He gave it a go after lockdown, but it hasn’t worked out so he lives back in New York now, where he made his name and where he has lived for the last 50 years. His teenage son Oisin and wife, the artist Liliane Tomasko, said hello when I arrived but now they’ve left us alone.
