Veteran artist who’s earned his stripes
SEÁN SCULLY’S current exhibition at the Kerlin Gallery in Dublin, Cut Ground, features a series of new paintings in the style he is renowned for: soft-edged bands of extravagant colour on canvasses so large that the space can accommodate only seven of them.
At 66, Scully might well be described as a veteran artist. But he still cuts a dynamic figure. He’s a hard man, a black belt in karate who many find intimidating on first encounter, not least because of what he calls the “fish and chips” accent acquired in his years growing up in London. Get to know him a little better, however, and what shines through is his innate intelligence. His paintings may seem simplistic, but their construction is backed up by a vast knowledge of art history, on which Scully has written and lectured throughout his career.
“People think I’m very serious, but I’m not, I’m actually quite vivacious,” he says.
He loves being back in Dublin, the city of his birth. He was aged just four when his family moved to London, and he has lived in New York since the early 1970s, but he still considers Dublin home.
Scully last exhibited at the Kerlin Gallery in 2007, when he showed a series of photographs of the stone walls of the Aran Islands. The four years since have brought both misfortune and joy. “I’ve had four operations in that time,” he says.
“I’ve had a hernia operation, two operations on my shoulders, and another on my knee. They knocked the crap out of me, I have to say. But I’m making a real good comeback now. I should be patched up for the next 10 years. I’m like a Mercedes that’s got 200,000km on the clock. You know what they’re like, nice and sluggish.”
Scully’s health issues coincided with some other huge changes in his life. He married his long-term partner, Liliane Tomasko, in 2007, and they now have a child, Oisin, who’s “two and a bit. It’s fantastic, I love having a son. I’ve got the full package now, paradise on earth.”
Scully is aware of how his personal happiness has impacted on his painting. “I think the colours have lifted a bit, which is interesting. The gloom in my paintings is not quite as evident. I’m making very small paintings at the moment, but they’re extremely full of colour. “It’s quite a sea-change to make these little paintings. They’re got a buoyancy and they’re a little bit crazy in a way the big paintings are not.”
The only example of these ‘little paintings’ in the Kerlin exhibition measures 71com by 81cm, still large by Irish standards; its companions are typically huge. He says the new work is clearly influenced by Vincent Van Gogh. “Van Gogh has always been a great inspiration to me, particularly his use of yellow. It’s very complicated; his yellows are quite depressing… they’re dirty, sour and pale. It’s a colour you can do a lot with, as I do.”
Greys and pinks also jostle for inclusion in his new work. For years, Scully has divided his time between his permanent home in New York and two other homes, in Munich and Barcelona. But, of late, he’s been living on a farm in Bavaria. “The greys in these new paintings are from the big Bavarian sky,” he says. “And the pinks are from the Alps. At the end of the day, for about 10 minutes, you get the most extraordinary pinks on the mountains and in the sky.”
Scully was surprised at how well he took to country life in Bavaria. “I was terrified at first,” he says. “I’m a city creature, but I fit right in.”
Scully is one of the biggest names in painting in the United States, and his work is in museums and private collections all over the world. But in Britain, it seems, there is still resistance to his influence.
“I think I was very integrated in Britain,” he says of his upbringing there. “But my influences in painting are not British. I mean, what could they be? Turner? Well, Turner was a very great artist, and I love his paintings, and we do have something in common; his father was a barber, and so was mine. So there you have it. And in a certain sense he didn’t live in England because he lived on a river-boat. So he lived about three inches away from England.
“But my influences are continental, or American: Rothko, Masaccio, Andre Durand, Matisse, Mondrian. I don’t know why people would be offended by that, but I put all their noses out of joint in England. There’s still this kind of funny ‘oh fuck, here he is again, what’s he going to say this time?’. And of course the more famous I become the more uncomfortable they become, because I left and I prospered.”
His relationship with Ireland is far more comfortable. “I think I’m very Irish. Psychologically I’m very connected,” he says. “My relationship to history is very Irish. For example, my son’s name is Oisin Vincent Janos Scully. The Janos is a nod to his Hungarian mother. But the Vincent is not after Vincent Van Gogh. It’s taken from the tomb, in Cashel, of Vincent Scully, who perished fighting that pathological maniacal murderer Oliver Cromwell. The Scullys and the Tierneys were the two armies that faced Cromwell’s army, and lost, of course.
“I’m very connected to it, this disenfranchisement, to the loss of our social position. I come from an aristocratic caste in the Irish sense, the Scullys. We fell pretty far. And I’ve corrected the situation,” he laughs.
So is this what motivates him, righting a great historical wrong? “It’s in there. I’m not one who bears grudges, but it’s certainly in there.”
Scully donated eight paintings to Dublin City Gallery: the Hugh Lane in 2006. It was an extraordinarily generous gesture, one that confirmed the depth of the connection he feels to the city. He returns to Dublin often, and the prospect of moving back on a permanent basis is, he insists, “under serious consideration”.
“My wife is a great admirer of the Irish,” he says. “Really. She sees us as the only true Christians. She thinks the Irish embody the generosity of spirit that is connected to the philosophy of Christianity. And I think there’s some truth in that.”
Is Scully religious? “I believe in God. I don’t know what God is, I think it’s a conceit to try to describe him, or to box him in. I think God is an immensity that we cannot comprehend or codify.
“But I do believe in a spiritual dimension. I think we are spiritual creatures, and God is in us, and we have to find our immortality, we have to earn it. That’s what I’m doing, as a painter, I’m fighting for our future.
“And if I’m wrong, it won’t matter anyway, will it?” he laughs again. “’Cos I’ll be gone.”
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