Sean Scully, the Irish-born, US-based abstract painter, is showing new works in Paris that continue his lifelong exploration of rectangles, squares and strips of colour. The exhibition, at the Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, has been described as playing the blues in paint, with long, textured blue notes alternating with black, red and brown. Scully draws an analogy with instrumental music: abstract painting, he says, is like Miles Davis or John Coltrane, carrying no words, unlike the Beatles.
The artist says his fascination with blue stems from having had the blues since childhood. Born in Dublin in 1945, he moved to London as a small child and grew up in a slum off the Old Kent Road. His birth certificate lists his father's profession as 'traveller'. His grandfather, after whom he is named, hanged himself in a military prison in Chatham, Kent, in 1916 while awaiting execution for deserting the British army to join the Easter Rising.
Scully describes himself as Anglo-Irish, with an irresolvable inner tension between order and abandon. He speaks of being 'the product of a completely smashed-up family' and recalls his mother as 'a hurricane' or 'a monsoon'. A clash between his mother and the nuns who taught him led to his being removed from the Catholic school at age seven, which he says triggered a nervous breakdown. He asked his mother for an altar at home; she refused, and he lost his religion, trying ever since to put it back together with art.
After training as a figurative artist in England, Scully moved to New York in 1975. He found the American avant garde of the time, including abstractionists such as Barnett Newman, 'emptied out' and lacking feeling. His own work, by contrast, maintains an emotional turbulence beneath a neat surface, suggesting that suffering and anguish remain central to his practice.
