Sean Scully & Composition

Various Sketches by Sean Scully, 1980s

“What I am painting is a simple divisional structure, but you see the way it is painted, what colour is painted, and how many times it is painted in relation to that simple structure … What I did, basically, was I went back to what it was originally based on.”

Quote from Sean Scully

Back and Fronts by Sean Scully, 1981

Creating a very different artwork to the melancholic figurative paintings of Edward Hopper, whom I discussed in a previous detour, Sean Scully creates abstracted paintings and sculptures that still create a subliminal, somewhat melancholic atmosphere.

They are very architectural in representation both in two and three dimensions. He explores many of the same qualities that interest architects: space, composition, colour, balance and both symmetrical and asymmetrical harmony. His paintings look like building elevations and his sculpture like a building before its skin is applied.

Also, his process is somewhat similar in that, in most cases, he draws on paper first to work through an idea before committing it to his preferred medium. Again, this process reminds me of the right process to create good architecture.

Photographic composition of various shopfronts.

Many of Scully’s canvases can be directly related to architectural structures like street patterns or shopfronts in specific cities or suburbs. Geometric structures such as, framing devices surrounding doorways and windows are a continuing physical link between his photographs and his paintings, and works on paper.

Taken from ‘Body of Light’ NGV exhibition document

Selected Sketches by Sean Scully, 1980-82.

Process Sketch, Boxes of Air by Sean Scully, 2015

Boxes of Air by Sean Scully, 2016

His achievement in the 1980s, I think, was to endow painting with the scale and texture of architecture – of things constructed plank by plank, stone by stone, hope by evanescent hope. Their story is that of the will to achieve in the face of despair. Building things up – it’s a noble response to life, which has a way of tearing you down whether through natural hardships…or man-made ones.

Taken from the essay ’The Duane Street Years’ by Deborah Solomon, 2016