Sean Scully: the WANDERER Soon to Turn 70, the Irish- Born Painter Has Been on the Move Since the Age of Four

62 THE ART NEWSPAPER Number 268, May 2015 FEATURES Artist interview Sean Scully: THE WANDERER Soon to turn 70, the Irish- born painter has been on the move since the age of four. With major shows opening in Venice and other cities, he tells how travelling the world helps him stay “in an active situation”. By Pac Pobric n the Bavarian Alps, mobile phone reception is elusive and Sean Scully is chasing it when I reach him by phone. He is driving to his farmhouse and studio in the village of Mooseurach with his five-year-old son, Oisín, who is in the back seat playing with Star Wars Lego. Scully is in an enthusiastic mood. He is in Germany for a five-month stay and has been Ilooking forward to the reprieve. “I always paint well here because it’s very relaxed,” he says on the phone. “But I paint well wherever I am.” Scully turns 70 in June, and the unfolding birthday celebrations have taken him all over the world. His retrospective Follow the Heart opened at the Himalayas Art Museum in Shanghai in November 2014 and travelled to the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, where it closed in April. Another survey, Moving or Profound or Necessary or Beautiful, at the Pinacoteca do Estado in São Paulo (until 28 June), opened in April. By the end of the year, 13 galleries and museums in eight countries will have hosted exhibitions of Scully’s work, including the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin (12 May-20 September), the reopened Museum Liaunig in Wandering animates Scully’s imagination of a story about a visit to his studio from Diane Neuhaus, Austria (which was due to open on 26 and there is a James Joycean quality to his roving Waldman, a former curator at the Solomon April, as we went to press), and the Palazzo Falier thoughts. He weighs his words carefully before R. Guggenheim Museum. She brought a young in Venice (Land Sea, 9 May- 22 November), as part speaking (“I’m trying to be diplomatic,” he says colleague who “loved my work”, Scully says. of the 56th Venice Biennale. at one point, after pausing between thoughts on “But Diane Waldman was a bit stand-ofsh— Mark Rothko), but once he begins, he is difcult very New York, very cool. And she looked at a Restless and rootless to slow down. He speaks in short, sharp phrases painting and said, ‘What’s that one called?’ and Mooseurach might be a respite, but Scully is rest- that are hard to isolate because they are always I said, ‘Come In’ and she said, ‘Oh yes, I can see less. When I first meet him in New York, before expanding. In Scully’s vocabulary, some words it’s very architectonic, and this could be seen the phone call, he has just sold his Chelsea studio have no synonyms because their meaning is too as a door.’” of 16 years and is in the midst of building a new precise, so he uses them repeatedly as he elabo- But the title in fact came from a friend of one in the nearby town of Palisades. He is making rates a thought. Stories that look like diversions Scully’s, who told the painter an anecdote about plans to open studios in Berlin and London are intimately tied to the main idea. His expres- Joyce and Beckett. “Beckett was taking dictation and is fighting the urge to spend more time in sions are lyrical but precise: his paintings are from Joyce and somebody knocked on the door,” Venice. “It’s really hard not to live there if you’re “the skin” of an emotion; his art can be seen as Scully says. “Joyce said, ‘Come in’ and Beckett European,” he says. “You really have to fight it of. Minimalism “compressed” with Romanticism; his wrote down ‘Come in’ and the next day Joyce It has these long fingers that reach out towards slabs of colour are “like soft packets of wrapped reads aloud: ‘…and he goes along here she was you so that you spend five years of your life being air that I put into place”, he says. with hair black as coal, come in.’ And he says to disappointed in Venice before you leave.” Maybe “Being an Irish person,” Scully says, “you Beckett, ‘What did you write down “come in” China, where his retrospective has been graciously naturally have access to a lyrical use of language. for?’ And Beckett said, ‘You say come in, I write received (“There have been 150 reviews,” Scully I think a love of language promotes ideas because come in.’ And I considered it a gift that a friend tells me), would be better: “I really like it there. ideas come from articulation. It’s not simply of mine had come in and given me [the story of] I love the people, I’m fascinated by them. Yes, I that you have an idea you then compose into ‘come in’—so, Come In.” could easily live there.” prose; prose itself creates ideas. The way that Since Scully was a boy, rootlessness has been verbs, nouns and tenses are constructed produces Verbal education his only real permanence. He was born in Ireland thought. It flows back. Writing and painting spill As Scully tells it, Waldman was not impressed: in 1945 but moved with his family to London over, one to the other.” “When I had given this mad explanation with when he was four. Poverty prevented any real Beckett and Joyce, I could see that she had a stability. “We moved around a lot because we were Literary sensibility Transatlantic view: Sean Scully in his studio in New look of mild disgust on her face. Right there I homeless and starving,” Scully says. “And this has Scully is an eager reader, and his literary sensibil- York City, which he is leaving after 16 years. He is understood that this square peg would not fit into given me a relationship with place that is brutal.” ity sometimes informs the titles of his paintings. building a new studio in Palisades, New York, and a round hole.” But the episode speaks to the way He left home at 19 and later, in 1975, emigrated His 1982 work Heart of Darkness takes its name plans to open others in Berlin and London. Landline Scully thinks: discussion is his first school. to New York. In 1983, he became a US citizen, but from Joseph Conrad’s novella. Pale Fire (1988) is Green Sea (2014), one of the works he will show Although he earned a degree from Newcas- wanderlust has always taken precedence over titled after Vladimir Nabokov’s book of the same in his exhibition at the Palazzo Falier in Venice this tle University in 1972 and that same year was homemaking: Mexico, Morocco and Spain have all name. And the novel Molloy, written in 1951 by summer, is part of a series referencing landscape, awarded a fellowship to continue his work at since served as temporary homes. In each place, Scully’s countryman, Samuel Beckett, is also the marking a departure for the artist Harvard University, he says his real ideas come Scully has been motivated by his unease. title of a picture Scully painted in 1984. from what others leave behind in conversation. “I do it to stay in an active situation,” he says. But titles are elusive and Scully’s pictures are “My education is nearly all verbal,” he says. “It’s “You can’t get too comfortable. Art comes from as restless as he is. They always amble away from from talking to people like you. You come in, discomfort, I’m sorry to say.” the language that tries to hold them. Scully is fond drop something and I pick it up.” ARTIST COURTESYPORTRAIT: OF SEAN SCULLY STUDIO. LANDLINE GREEN SEA: © PHOTOSEAN BY CHRISTOPH SCULLY, KNOCH THE ART NEWSPAPER Number 268, May 2015 63 Digest Sean Scully OFF CANVAS BACKGROUND April 15–June 12, 2015 Born: 30 June 1945, Dublin, Ireland Early life: Scully’s family moves from Dublin to London in 1949. In one of his frst trips away from Ireland, Scully and his family are stranded aboard a ship lost at sea for eight hours before the captain fnds his way. At the time, as Scully later told a journalist, the situation was precarious. “The waters those days were full up with foating mines” left over from the Second World War. Nearly 40 years later, the experience informed Scully’s work Precious (1987), which speaks to his parents’ most cherished cargo: their son. Education: In 1960, Scully becomes an apprentice at a commercial printing shop; two years later he starts classes at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. He earns a bachelor’s degree from Newcastle University in 1972 and is then awarded the John Knox Fellowship for a one-year residency at Harvard University. Lives: New York, Mooseurach, Germany, and Barcelona Represented by: Cheim & Read, New York; Timothy Taylor Gallery, London; Kerlin Gallery, Dublin; Kewenig Gallery, Berlin; La Taché Gallery, Barcelona; Galerie Lelong, Paris MILESTONES Catherine (1975) Scully’s early work, from the mid-1960s, is fgurative, but by 1969, he begins to make abstract pictures. In the early 1970s, his paintings are cerebral yet colourful, but that changes after his emigration to New York in 1975, when Scully’s work becomes more austere. He later told the poet Carter Ratclif that he felt the need to paint “severe, invulnerable canvases so that I could be in [New York] and not feel exposed”.

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