The colour blue has a particular resonance within Sean Scully’s practice, and with the exhibition Blue, his unique expression of light and emotion through chromatic nuance is celebrated to particularly poetic effect. Each of the nine gem-like Wall of Light paintings, in various shades of blue on copper, is an ode to the echoes of memory and place that the colour blue stirs in the artist.
Watch the artist read his accompanying poem, Blue (2024)
When asked by the poet and art critic Kelly Grovier when he first started thinking about art, Scully responded with a memory from his early childhood in London: ‘I remember I had a bicycle. And I’ll never forget it. It was a cerulean blue.’ It was in the recognition of ‘that lovely pale blue’ and the feelings it evoked, back in his earliest pre-school years, that Scully believes he became an artist.
Wall Sea Blue, 2024
Oil on copper
70 x 70 cm (27.56 x 27.56 in)
Scully began the Blue series of paintings during a two-year period living in Hampstead, London, and working from a studio in Kentish Town, not far from where he spent those first formative years with his blue bicycle, living in his grandmother’s boarding house in Highbury. The resulting muted, beclouded cobalts and greys of Wall Cobalt White (2024) conjure London’s cool northerly light. With Wall Blue Moor (2024), the viewer senses the grey rain of a deep Hampstead twilight, and with Wall Pale Grey (2024), the seeping post-war fog.
Wall Pale Grey, 2024
Oil on copper
70 x 70 cm (27.56 x 27.56 in)
‘When I make a painting,’ Scully states, ‘that’s when all my turmoil is in the air. They’re not a way of showing, they’re a way of dealing with things. [...] If I make a painting with high colour, I’m very proud of myself because I’ve overcome my sorrow.’ In Scully’s writing practice, too, whether in prose or poetry, memories of places and of moments in time, and the emotions that accompany them, are often crystallised in colour.
Blue Bird, 2024
Oil on copper
70 x 70 cm (27.56 x 27.56 in)
In his poem, also titled Blue, which features in the book published to accompany the exhibition, he memorialises the childhood experience of watching his mother sing Unchained Melody on stage: ‘people held hands, the hall turned Blue.’ The emotive, thunderous lilacs and mauves of Blue Bird (2024) and Night Sea (2024) bring to mind the artist’s mother on the Vaudeville stage in Sheerness – ‘the incandescent female, in a pink taffeta dress’ singing her ‘sad song’ – and ‘the passage of rivers, that take us out there, out to the blue sea’.
Night Sea, 2024
Oil on copper
70 x 70 cm (27.56 x 27.56 in)
BLUE
Sean Scully, 2024
It’s the color of Angels.
But, is it really the color of Cleopatra’s
eye? I thought she was Egyptian,
and those brown eyes hypnotized,
the blue eyes of her conquerors.
My mother was a singer, and her
theme song was Unchained Melody: a sad
song marrying the passing of time
and love with the passing flowing
passage of rivers, that take us out there,
to the blue sea.
She sang in Vaudeville, at the
end of every show, as the incandescent
female, in a pink taffeta dress,
that held me in awe, as she brought
the post-war audience into tears,
with her delicate voice, wrapped around
wistful melancholia.
Somewhere, in the middle of the song,
people held hands, the hall turned Blue.
The works in the exhibition embody not only the artist’s deep emotional connection to place, but a profound engagement with the history of painting, and ‘the deep romantic tradition of light-filled colored surfaces’. Exploring the sweep of emotional and improvisational possibilities accessible through the colour blue, Scully mines the tonal registers used in the early 20th century by the great painters of European Modernism.
Pablo Picasso, Femme assise, Pablo Picasso, 1902—1903
Detroit Institute of Arts, MI.
Wall Blue Blue, 2024
Oil on copper
70 x 70 cm (27.56 x 27.56 in)
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, NY
State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg
Alongside the Wall of Light works on copper in shades of blue, a monumental work belonging to the artist’s Landline series, painted on an aluminium ground, is also on view in the exhibition. Begun in 2013, Scully’s Landline series marked a shift in the artist’s practice, evoking horizons and landscapes, rather than the architectural, brick-like structures of his Wall of Light compositions. The artist’s abstractions are always rooted in the forms he finds in the real world: as Scully put it, they ‘lurch towards association’.
Landline Vermillion Grey, 2025
Oil on aluminium
215.9 x 190.5 cm (85 x 75 in)
