Minimalism and Emotional Abstraction
Sean Scully is an Irish-born American-based contemporary artist born in 1945. He is a painter, printmaker, sculptor and photographer. Scully often uses oil paint on canvas or aluminium. His technique is much like a plasterer in its physicality and broad gestures, which probably originated in his youth whilst he worked plastering houses. The Tate website credits Scully with having helped lead the transition from Minimalism to Emotional abstraction in painting, returning to metaphor and spirituality in art.
He is relevant to my work due to his personal and emotional choice of colour palette, and his minimalist influences.
Scully says he always listens to Agnes Obel as he paints, and says that his painting process is very rhythmical and physical, and also that there is a great sensitivity in his work. The repetition in his work is is objective, considering his huge linear brush strokes across many many of his works. "There's a lot of beat, a lot of rhythm in the structures. I'm very connected to contemporary music in my head." (8 questions with Scully interview)
Agnes Obel (born 1980) is a Danish folk musician, who writes, plays, sings, records and produces music herself. Her compositions are often slow and melancholic ballads.
Through influencing Scully, Obel also relates to my work, through her music. Additionally, her single The Curse can be said to contain minimalist elements, speaking in musical terms, such as percussive techniques played using a violin, and repetition in using a loop pedal. These elements are seen in the work of other musicians I am researching, for example John Cage's affinity with percussion, and Brian Eno's tendency to use loops in his ambient music. This connection confirms my interest in creating a minimalist inspired piece of music to accompany a visual piece of art.
In another interview, The Personal Artistic Philosophy of Sean Scully, he says he tries to use a language meant to be universal. "There should be something in it that everybody can recognise". He goes on to say that in order to use the most common vocabulary, you need to simplify, which leads you to a situation you could be dealing with a kind of banality because you are looking for the common denominator... It relates to repetitive building techniques that populate the whole world. Scully then connects this universal language with the personal. "The surface and treatment show human labour and love of labour, reflective of the evolution of one person." (The Personal Artistic Philosophy of Sean Scully interview, 2012)
His work is often sombre with dark colours, especially after the death of his first son, yet the works about his young son are bright and joyful, particularly the Madonna Triptych painted in 2018.
LANDLINES AND THE MADONNA TRIPTYCH
Landline Black Veined Oisin, 2017, by Sean Scully © The artist
I chose to research Scully since I visited his exhibition 'HUMAN', in Venice. Collaborating with the 2019 Venice Biennale, Scully's work was exhibited in Palladio's San Giorggio Maggiore. I was particularly taken with his Landline paintings, and the triptych of his wife and son. Past the bold façades and emotional significance of these works to Scully, I enjoyed experiencing how these works were displayed in the exhibition space. Landline was a series of 8 paintings hung along a corridor which instructs the viewer to walk alongside, echoing the linear path of brushstrokes. Scully's comments on his Landlines say as much, that the lines can be analogous to our own life journey.
Madonna Triptych, 2018, Oil and oil pastel on aluminum, 3 panels – 85 x 75 in. (215.9 x 190.5 cm.)
The triptych of his young son and wife was displayed in a small chamber that makes the three oil paintings loom over the viewer. Made all the more intimidating since only a few people would enter the small space at a time. Breaking Scully's traditional large and horizontal brush stroke style, these are some of the few figurative paintings he has done, they depict his family at the beach and the bright colour choices signify how the birth of his son brought him back to life. Scully was deeply affected by the premature death of his first son years before in a car crash.
I like the large scale, the physicality in the process of painting, particularly the musical notions he mentions, (rhythmic and minimalist elements) the emotional significance of the colour palette, the scale of the works and how they are exhibited in space. Recalling how these works were exhibited, I began considering how my final piece may be made of multiple pieces, perhaps a triptych, and if the display would serve to tell of a narrative more than the abstract painting would.
The BBC documentary Unstoppable: Sean Scully and the Art of Everything reveals that whilst he was studying art at Newcastle University, Scully saw some bathroom grafitti that read "Time was invented to stop everything happening at once", which he says stuck in his mind. Later on, he thought "abstract painting was invented to make everything happen at once."
My take on this was that an abstract painting could serve to be part of my multifaceted work, perhaps as an abstract painting and a minimalist audio. When combining art and music, there is bound to be speculation on whether one is a narrative of the other, for example considering if the song describes the picture or if the art is to visualise the music. An abstract work, however, can help diminish a potential narrative in order to 'make everything happen at once.'
In my work, I want to incorporate minimalist elements, that will go hand in hand with my musical audio component. In a similar way to Scully's work, I want there to be something everybody can recognise. Just as Scully creates his work to be significant to a certain time in his life, my work will resemble my situation amidst the current lockdown circumstances, which also conveniently fits with my previous research into Angelica Mesiti's themes of daily life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZL_Dk_t8lY interview 8 questions with Scully, mentioning Agnes Obel, 2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjNQEEaezKQ The Personal Artistic Philosophy of Sean Scully Interview, 2012
https://www.agnesobel.com/ Agnes Obel site
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1wgaFJ0750 Agnes Obel -The Curse, 2013
https://www.wallpaper.com/art/sean-scully-san-giorgio-maggiore-church-venice-biennale article on Scully at Venetian church
Unstoppable: Sean Scully and the Art of Everything, 02:25 22/04/2019, BBC2 England, 80 mins.
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