Divine Reclamation: Sean Scully on Long Island
By Rebecca Allan
Dangling from a quince tree at Sean Scully’s studio, a bald-faced hornets’ nest buzzes like a chainsaw. We’ve stepped through the back door into the garden for an impromptu pruning of things that the artist has planted in Tappan, New York over the past decade. When I say garden, imagine an expanse of ground the length of a soccer field, between a high concrete wall and a protective, spiked metal fence. The plot burgeons with fruit trees, container tomatoes, and climbing roses that Scully takes great pleasure in tending, even if the pruning is made infrequent by his prodigious work and travel commitments, and family life.
Land restoration began in 2013, when Scully and his wife, the painter Liliane Tomasko, acquired the property—a decommissioned broadcasting station insulated by boggy woods and utility lines. They cleared all manner of debris—oil drums, car parts and pavement chunks disposed over the years—and planted saplings. The resulting effort is a provisionally tamed landscape with cut-through views of chosen stumps under a canopy of sky. It is as if “Capability” Brown came over to place the choicest specimens— cryptomerias, tupelos, and sculptures of stacked iron, steel, and wood. An unpainted Japanese footbridge over a croaking pond pays homage to Monet’s garden at Giverny.
This garden is a project of divine reclamation, a practice that runs through Sean Scully’s life and work, from the construction in 1978 of his studio at 110 Duane Street in New York, to the paintings he made on Long Island during a transformative residency in the summer of 1982. That August, Scully received a fellowship to spend a month at the Edward F. Albee Foundation, on the playwright’s compound in Montauk. Established in 1967 by Albee with proceeds from his play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the foundation has provided residencies for visual artists and writers at the William Flanagan Memorial Creative Persons Center, familiarly known as “the Barn.” I asked Sean how his invitation came to be, and he responded: “There were no letters, no adjudicators, no requirements. It was just because Albee liked your work.”
This summer, at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York, Sean Scully: The Albee Barn, Montauk surveys the artist’s work from 1981 to 2024, exploring his Long Island connection, and the transformative impact it made on his subsequent work. Organized by Mónica Ramírez-Montagut, Ph.D., Executive Director, with Kaitlin Halloran, Associate Curator and Publications Manager, the exhibition reunites fifteen paintings made during his month-long residency, then carries us forward with pivotal works of succeeding decades that, even in their monumental scale, contain the genetic material of these diminutive works. What follows is a reflection on Scully's oeuvre in relation to other Long Island-based paintings—touchstones for the perennial reinvention of an American landscape tradition.
