‘I’m the Product of a Broken Family’: How Sean Scully Became the Greatest Abstract Painter Living | Art and design

WWhen I asked Sean Scully what distinguishes an abstract painting compared to a figurative painting, what music does he look for? “You might ask, ‘What did Miles Davis beat the Beatles with?’ And the answer is: It doesn’t have any words in it. And then you can say, ‘What did the Beatles beat John Coltrane with?’ Well, they do have words.”

It’s clear which choice he made. Scully, who paints rectangles, squares and strips of color that abut and slide into each other, is a painter, not a pop artist. The meaning of his art is something you feel, not something you can easily describe. He has more in common with Davis and Coltrane than with the Beatles. In addition to improvisational brilliance, his new palettes match the colors of Coltrane’s classic album Blue Train and Davis’s Kind of Blue. For Scully, the greatest living abstract painter, plays the blues in Paris. In his current exhibition at the city’s Thaddeus Roback Gallery, long, smoky blue tones alternate like a midnight saxophone and mingle with black, red, and brown in slow, sad, beautiful music that doesn’t need words, and art that doesn’t require pictures.

Those blues have been with Scully since childhood. “I became interested in the color blue because I had the blues.” He told me that he was still driven by pain while drinking green tea in the upper room of the gallery. “Even now I’m terrified of the dark. I can’t walk across a room in the dark and I can’t get out of my car in the dark.” Fortunately, the gallery is brightly lit – all white. But the pain is present in his art, the feeling that beneath an apparently polite order of civilization – patterns of neat rectangles like plowed fields or windows in the front of a house – emerges a storm of uncontrollable emotions. In his blue paintings, inner turmoil escalates more powerfully than ever before.

Scully was born in Dublin in 1945, and moved to London as a young child. He was named after his grandfather who hanged himself in a military prison in 1916 in Chatham, Kent, while awaiting execution by firing squad – he had deserted from the British Army to try to join the Easter Rising. But Scully is not purely Irish: he feels an internal tug of war. “I’m Anglo-Irish. And you have this unsolvable, endless dance between order and abandonment, that’s all in me all the time and will be in me until the day I die.”

He has been “tortured” since he was a child in post-war London. “I am the product of a completely broken family, an Irish family.” His father also deserted from the British Army during World War II and was imprisoned. By the late 1940s, “my mother and I were in this slum off the Old Kent Road. On my birth certificate by my father’s occupation, it says ‘traveller.'”

His mother’s personality dominated his childhood. “My mother was really a hurricane. Or maybe a monsoon would be more accurate: she was warm and enveloping but left everything broken. So that would be a good metaphor.”

It was the conflict between his mother and the nuns who taught him that frightened him. She “got into a big fight with them because they said if my father worked on Sunday, the devil would get under my bed.”

At the age of seven, Scully was taken away from scary nuns, but also from Catholic beauty ceremonies and rituals. “So I had a kind of nervous breakdown. I went to public school and I think that’s when I became an artist. That unbelievable tear. I asked my mother could I have an altar at home, and she said no. So I lost my religion, and I couldn’t put it back together again. I tried to put it back together through art.”

Scully trained in England as a graphic artist, supported himself with manual labor, then in 1975 moved to New York, where his post-war art moved on the abstract side. When he arrived, he was the last of the Abstract Expressionists fighting with the Minimalists. But for him the American avant-garde had lost all sense of itself. “They’ve been hollowed out. They’ve made art big and symbolic, but also empty.”

Like who?

He flaunted the quasi-religious vocation of abstract art in his cycle of paintings “Stations of the Cross,” says Newman, referring to the Abstract Expressionist painter and sculptor Barnett Newman, who created fields of pure color and vast space divided by vertical lines that were interpreted as divine lightning. For Scully this was pure vanity. He even questions the Abstract Expressionist’s holy of holies, Rothko’s Chapel in Houston: “I found it extraordinarily disappointing.” I’m a little bristle because I love Rothko.

Despite his misgivings, Scully was and remains an heir to these artists. He is attracted to the “religious and romantic” side of America that gave birth to their sublime art. In the 1970s and 1980s, he found a way to infuse that romantic spirituality into paintings that at first glance seemed like the regular, unreflexive patterns and arrangements with which the Minimalist movement sought to soothe their elders. He still moves through forms with simple simplicity but with an unmistakable inner passion. In his blue paintings, he says, “I try to make supports and unions and relationships that are difficult and weird and sweet and poetic, and reflect all the ways that bodies can come together, and bodies can share something, just like we have to share this planet. I think about all of those things when I paint my paintings and that’s kind of what it represents.” The size of his paintings also matters greatly, or rather not so much. “I think the fact that they’re so young makes them vulnerable in a way. The intimacy between them is very, very strong. They’re not heroic.”

He is clearly still searching for the faith he lost as a child, and he is so deeply drawn to the spiritual dimension in art that made Rothko want to place his paintings in a chapel: “Abstract painting goes straight to your soul. So I think it has to believe in some kind of spiritual force. I mean, that’s its function, because it’s pre-verbal, right? It explodes, right inside.”

As he speaks I can see his paintings in the basement, a river and hills of blue and black and puddles of tear paint that speak directly to the soul. But I wonder whether it was the “English” aspect of his Anglo-Irish identity that enabled him to rejuvenate abstract art. Characterized by a meat-and-potatoes English experimentalism, his paintings delve into real emotions.

And Scully was truly devastated. In 1983, his first son, Paul, died in a car accident at the age of 18. “Those things, they just feed on themselves.” He “went off the rails” with grief. “I have a lot of sadness inside me, but I love to paint. I love it. I’m very happy in my studio. I go there every day. I like to go there and mess around or prepare something, you know, do something. But when I paint, I paint very directly.”

He has flown to Paris today from Dublin where he has just opened a show and will play another show in London. Scully is devoted to family life and cares for his teenage son, Oisin. Not long ago they moved to London for schools. They are now back in New York because Oisin “hates” London. They go to the Catholic Church, because although Scully cannot regain his faith, his son has become interested in religion. In his garden, he has a replica of the bridge from Monet’s garden and behind it are statues of Buddha and an angel. He likes to tease visitors by saying, “You can’t speak out loud because there’s an angel,” as if he thought there was a real angel.

Abstract painting is still controversial: the random squares, the color combinations are all very good, but aren’t they just pretty patterns like wallpaper? Today, much of what is considered abstract art is as empty as dots on wrapping paper. But really strong abstract painting, like Scully’s, has a sense of necessity and inevitability: it has to be this way. It expresses mysteries that cannot be put in any other way.

Despite his doubts about the Church of Mark Rothko, Scully is the only abstract painter existing today whom I would dream of comparing to the Russian-born Jewish-American genius. In the blue paintings, you feel the mystery and intensity of Rothko.

“When you listen to the song Nessun Dorma,” he says, again referring to the music as an analogy, “it makes you cry — but you don’t know what the words are. That’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to break people’s hearts. I want to make abstraction popular without lowering the bar.”