SEAN SCULLY

UNSTOPPABLE:Sean Scully and The Art of Everything

A great programme on BBC2 last night on the painter Sean Scully. I like him! He is self made, a fellow curmudgeon and single minded to the point of 'bloody minded' self contained and the most determinedly driven painter I have ever come across. 

Unstoppable: Sean Scully and The Art of Everything [BBC2]

Auntie says: 

"A year in the life of abstract artist Sean Scully, one of the world’s richest painters. Little known at home but a superstar abroad, Sean flies around the world to open 15 major museum exhibitions - a journey that also reveals his extraordinary life story.

Now, at the age of 73, Scully opens up about his unique experiences spanning 55 years in an often hostile art world - how he built a reputation from nothing, having grown up penniless on the streets of Dublin and London, often homeless as a child and running with street gangs as a teenager, to turn his striped paintings into the huge success they are today."

I like the artisanal aspect of a plasterer coming to paint, he is a colourist, and specialises in stripes. There that about sums it up.  I don't like the early hard edge work and enjoyed the later block stripe work with it's 'handwriting'  and rougher edges and yet his use of colour remains whether it is black and grey or bright blue against greens and oranges. They are about colour . . . . 

Rest assured he is worthy of closer inspection . . . 

He doesn't care what critics say anymore and rightly so deciding there is no purpose in them (was there ever?) Waldemnar Janusczek says you 'really, really, really' must watch the programme as he is "crackers". He isn't! Crtic Bill Feaver say the most apposite insightful observations and is clearly a fan but points out that doesn't matter either. He has no need of the Janusczek's of this world and let's face it none of us do. Scully is nothing if not driven. He is his own best publicist and owes his immense fortune to his hard graft and self publicising, self aggrandising, self belief. [He decided to paint when seeing a Van Gogh chair and thought 'Well, I could THAT'] You think ego maniac? He isn't somehow! It transcends such limiting definitions. He is aggressive and a physical presence not to be trifled with - he is a life long martial arts practitioner so be careful Waldemar he is most likely to knock you out when you meet!] and yet this doesn't serve him either. His grief at the loss of his first son and his later child with his third wife who inspired a sudden spurt of figurative work is endearing beyond words somehow.

There is a hilarious moment where he confronts his old student Ai Weiwei and says he doesn't care what he says about his work either when Weiwei says he prefers his early work not so much the recent stuff. He doesn't care what any of us say and with studios in New York and London, dealers on every continent and houses in three countries I am hardly surprised. Travelling everywhere by private jet he is the fulcrum, the very peak of what every artist I have ever met (and there have been a lot of them though don't think I ever met Sean) would wish to achieve from the sale of their work. 

I don't care for the later 'Ghost' works either which are reduced to mere cartoon as he faces the gun control issue of America which he rightly points out is not the Land of The Free anymore but the land of the gun. But he could care less . . . . that the great abstract painters return to figuration in the end is largely indulgent because he can. He has no money worries to limit him and if he chooses to produce cloying hackneyed cartoons ad nauseam then so be it. 

I don't care for his sculpture either and the monolithic gargantuan block pieces are kind of joke three dimensional versions of the paintings but then what do you expect, a Laocoon?

A colourist? Of course I was trained by a student of Terry Frost so I recognise a colour field when I see one and we all like pretty colours don't we? Meaning? Naaw . . . . . Philosophical? Naaw, not really but I can bathe in the light of their beauty if I choose. 

“I’m not one of these people who is privileged with doubt. I look at my paintings sometimes and I think they’re fucking wonderful. I love them.”

– Sean Scully