Art in Theory and Writing

Thoughts,    Ideas:     Abstraction------------------------------The Universal Language?

                                 Sean Scully------------------------------Bricklayer of the Soul

                                 Land, Sea and Sky--------------------"It's our World"

                                 Limestone-------------------------------Formed of trillions of tiny marine lifeforms over millions of years 

"We are all victims or products of our birth and upbringing" Sean Scully 

                               
Abstraction:   
I am intrigued by the subject of abstraction in both painting and sculpture and the movement between abstract and figurative modes of representation which started to happen at the beginning of the last century.

Abstraction became an international and identifiable style of painting in about the year 1910.

The french artist Maurice Denis predicted this in his essay in 1890 titled: A definition of  Neo-Traditionalism: "Remember that a painting, before being a battle horse, a naked woman or some anecdote or another is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain way."

Referring to abstraction Paul Klee stated: "Art does not try to reproduce the visible, it makes visible."

Gerhard Richter seemed to have a somewhat different view when he said: "It makes no sense to expect or claim to make the invisible visible, or the unknown known, or the unthinkable thinkable".
"The only true reality is always the reality that we see and experience directly".

Patrick Heron has written: "A purely abstract shape is easy to invent, what is difficult, so difficult that only genius can fully accomplish it, is the forging of a new and formal image out of familiar, well known forms.
What we look for in a painting is a recreation of the natural order, a significant transformation of everything we experience through the eye."

Abstract art can still manage to rile or provoke the general public.

When an artist makes an abstract image with one thought in mind, viewers can bring to it any number of other interpretations of what it looks like or means to them.

The view that representation can be emptied out of a painting, so that it is pure abstraction remains a controversial one.

In 1939, The German Baroness Hilla Rebay, referring to non-figurative painting, which she felt very passionately in favor of, wrote: "Like music, these paintings are harmonious, beautiful and restful. They elevate into the cosmic beyond where there is no meaning, no intellect, no explanation, but something infinitely greater--the wealth of spiritual intelligence and beauty. They help one to forget earth as most people do when they are looking up into the vastness of the starlight sky. One does not ask there, either, for meanings, symbols, titles, sense or intellectual explanation. One looks up and sees a vast beauty, and when the eye turns to the ground, its troubles seem to be so much smaller."

I have set out recently to try to discover what it is about abstract art that has compelled so many painters since the beginning of the last century to move from figurative to non-figurative work.

Due to the enormity of the subject, it seemed better to look at a particular artist who I consider to be the one of the leading proponents of abstraction. One such artist is Sean Scully.

Sean Scully:
 Like many artists Scully spent his early years in education exploring the possibilities of figurative painting. It was in 1968 when he began his studies for a BA at Newcastle University that he began to look at the potentialities of abstraction. He was at that time particularly attracted to the work of Mark Rotko. As well as painting Scully has produced a number of works on paper that explain the ideas behind his artwork and from reading many of these and seeing more and more of his canvases, I have become a great admirer of his very extensive oeuvre.

I have also found many different publications about his work and and his life and I have been looking in particular at his connection with the country of his origin, Ireland. In doing so I have developed a great sense of admiration for his honesty about his unhappy early life and upbringing and his unbiased views on how his life and his art was influenced by this. His own exact words in his philosophical are : "We are all victims or products of our birth and upbringing"
(In doing my research I also discovered that I have a few things in common with Scully:  One;  Irish born. Two; Catholic upbringing. Three; early education in a Convent. Four; his reference to being poor and working class. Five; he calls his bands of colour bricks and his process like building a wall.)

"From the traditions of abstraction, geometric and expressive, Sean Scully's work emerged confidently in the 1960s."

"People tend to think of abstraction as abstract. But nothing is abstract: It's a self-portrait. A portrait of one's condition." Sean Scully, Zurich, March 2006

Scully has inferred that the long standing quarrel between representation and abstraction is of no interest to him.

Scully has likened his process to the building of a wall, and indeed his paintings suggest walls, as well as windows and doors, the scaffold for his lavishly layered pigments and rhythmic, textured brushstrokes.

"It is not uncommon to find people previously bewildered by abstract painting who, after attending one of his lectures , happily recognize what a coherent form of communication it can be when presented with such intelligence and eloquence."

"My paintings search for meaning", Scully has said. He has no colour theory, preferring a painterly "conversation" where colour and form convey emotion and feeling. His paintings are about relationships; As he puts it: "My work is about the difficulty and the possibility of coming together."

Scully believes in an abstract art that can be a UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE for people of all religions and none. Regardless of his Irish Catholic influence Scully has said: "I wouldn't make a set of paintings that were overtly representative of a religious dogma of any kind, be it Zen, Jewish, Muslim or whatever. I simply would not do that, and I wouldn't be the right man for the job, because I want to make art that everybody can love and everybody can feel equally invited to."

A painting by Matisse in 1909 titled The Conversation depicts the artist in a dialogue with his wife Amelie. This painting, although it is not abstract, influenced many artists including Sean Scully. In the scene the artist looks as if he is standing to attention wearing striped pyjamas while his wife is seated wearing a very deep black and green bathrobe. Matisse's use of stripes becomes a key element in his paintings and is seen as heralding abstract paintings later development into work that is more linear and geometric, but also colourful and expressive.

"Not many artists since Matisse have developed the emotional vocabulary of colour like Scully has"

I was more than pleased to learn that Sean Scully and the late Seamus Heaney were good friends in their youth, as my favorite poet after Yeats is Heaney. Some of the lines in this poem called Postscript have a sense of spiritual kinship and might have been written in response to the emotions evoked by Scully's paintings:

At some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightening of flock of swans,
Their feathers ruffed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park or capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.


Land, Sea and Sky 
In an interview with Brian Kennedy  in 2007, with reference to the stripe, which is the basic motif  in his paintings,  Sean Scully said: "Land, Sea, Sky. It's what we have. I try to show it in a way that's very simple, giving equal importance to each of those elements. So, of course it relates to the paintings, just like three bands in the painting, three stripes in a painting."