The endless redrawn shoreline

Sean Scully, Aran, 2005

Sean Scully was the subject of a profile in the Guardian earlier this year with a clickbaity headline: ''I’m the product of a smashed-up family': how Sean Scully became the greatest abstract painter alive.' Of course abstract painters often seek inspiration for forms, rhythm and colour from landscape, and Scully is one such artist. You can see this in various ways at the Lisson Gallery's exhibition, The Nature of Art, which I visited last month. Aran (2005), for example, is a grid of the dry stone walls I have explored and photographed myself (see my earlier post 'Sentences on the sea', with quotes from Tim Robinson). He produced a book of these images, Walls of Aran, which has an introduction by Colm Tóibín. Scully was born in Ireland but grew up in London and did manual jobs while training to be an artist - he has talked about how he enjoyed seeing the forms made by stacking cardboard boxes in a factory. It is obvious why these carefully stacked stones of Aran would appeal to him.  

Landscape has most clearly influenced Scully's art in the Landlines series. An article in the Smithsonian magazine explains the origin of these works. 

It was 1999 when the artist Sean Scully approached the edge of a grassy cliff in Norfolk, England, out to the blue-green of the North Sea and the steely gray sky above it. “I saw a beautiful cliff and a very unusual possibility for a composition,” he says. The resulting photograph Land Sea Sky presented those three elements in roughly equal stripes across the pictorial space. ... “I try to paint this, this sense of the elemental coming together of land and sea, sky and land, of blocks coming together side by side, stacked in horizon lines endlessly beginning and ending,” he says, “the way the blocks of the world hug each other and brush up against each other, their weight, their air, their color, and the soft uncertain space between them.”

I have taken many photographs over the years of land, sea and sky forming bands of colours - I imagine we all have. I like the way you can vary the components - in Sussex you can also look back from the shoreline to photograph beach, cliffs and sky: grey, white and blue. The Lisson exhibition includes some of Scully's photographs, like Landline 1999 (brown, white, blue - land, surf, sea) and Landline (Lima Sunset) (2019) where, like Hiroshi Sugimoto, he just has two rectangles of sea and sky. Artists have been painting these bands of colour on the coast since The Monk and the Sea - on this blog I've mentioned Strindberg's Coastal Landscape II (1903) and Spilliaert's, Seascape Seen from Mariakerke (1909), but there was also Seurat at Gravelines, Richard Diebenkorn at Ocean Park, Patrick Heron at St. Ives, Brice Marden's Sea Paintings and Gerhard Richter's Seascapes. You could design a fascinating exhibition bringing images like these together. A few years ago Scully was invited to show new work at the National Gallery and his exhibition 'Sea Star' also included a near-abstract canvas by Turner, The Evening Star (1830).

Sean Scully, Natured (the endless redrawn shoreline) 12.22.25, 2025

Today I was in town again on my way to a Bernd and Hilla Becher show (excellent, but not really landscape art so I can't discuss it here) and walked through Hanover Square, where I took the photo below. This is a sculptural version of the Landline series, made from five blocks of marble. I guess it is always hard to write about art like this convincingly - when it was installed Scully explained that "marble is a natural material that is taken from the ground and has, as a consequence, a profound relationship with Nature." Hmm. Maybe he was partly thinking that it contrasts with the manufactured bronze used to cast the statue of William Pitt that stands across the road from it? The press release explained that 'the selected marbles translate the layered landscape of Hanover Square itself, the new gardens and surrounding buildings - the grey, sand and ochre of the footways and buildings, and the greens and blue- greens of the trees.' And you can see this in my image below, if you focus on the buildings and imagine more foliage and a more typical grey London day. Scully has simplified a complex townscape into a layering of colours resembling the naturally abstract views we experience on the edge of the sea.    

Sean Scully, Landline, 2023

Fire and Water

Today I paid a second visit to the Tate's Turner & Constable exhibition. The Guardian paraphrased Adrian Searle's review as 'boiling portentous skies versus two men and a dog' and provided the verdict upfront: 'JMW Turner is beaten by John Constable in this mighty show.' Few other reviewers were tempted to play the game of siding with one or the other, although The Tatler went for Turner - 'he was the out-and-out winner.' I don't think there's much doubt they were the two greatest landscape painters of their era - it's not like the 'who is best, Blur or Oasis?' debate, where the sensible verdict was always "Pulp". But their differences continue to fascinate - as the wall text above states one was 'all truth', the other 'poetry' and, as can clearly be seen at the Tate, where Constable's clouds and light-flecked trees and rivers sit alongside Turner's hazy, sunset vistas, 'one is silver, the other gold.'

At the risk of being annoying, I thought I would take the absurdity of ranking these two artists seriously and apply the crass five star system we are familiar with from movie reviews. I wasn't sure how this would come out, although I was expecting to side with poetry over truth, or what George Shaw describes in the exhibition film as Turner's elemental alignment with the air, over Constable's allegiance to the earth. In the first room of early work, leaving aside sketchbooks, each artist had 12 paintings and Turner edges it (37 versus 34, or 3.1 v 2.8 on average, per painting). We then move to two Turner and two Constable rooms. Turner's average for some lovely watercolours is brought down to 2.9 by four less impressive oil sketches, but he gets a 3.2 for his Alpine scenes. Constable 'in the outdoors' includes some of his less interesting sketches (2.6) but the room devoted to fields and skies features his celebrated cloud studies and paintings around Dedham (3.2). Overall, Turner is just in the lead as we come to a room called 'The Exhibition' which pits four Constables against five Turners. Here at least I have to agree with Searle, the perfection of Constable's The White Horse and sheer energy in his The Leaping Horse make him the clear winner.  

John Constable, Watermeadows at Salisbury, 1820

The next display, 'Fire and Water', includes this serene view of the landscape near Salisbury. As you look at it, you almost can't believe you're not looking at real water. The wall text explains that in 1830 it got accidentally assessed as a potential Royal Academy exhibit, while Constable was on the committee. His colleagues 'condemned it as 'a poor thing' that was 'very green'. Perhaps out of embarrassment, Constable stayed quiet.' Well it got five stars from me and Constable wins this room, with his famous views of Salisbury Cathedral and Hadleigh Castle easily beating Turner's Palace of Caligula. The next room has a clip from the Mike Leigh film Mr. Turner, which I wrote about here in 2015. Back then I quoted a review of an earlier Tate exhibition (in 2009) which viewed the artists as rivals, showing Constable's Opening of Waterloo Bridge alongside the Turner seascape it had overshadowed at the Royal Academy, until Turner cheekily added a red buoy on varnishing day. The Constable is on show here too, along with some of his later works which I don't find very appealing (2.4). The late Turners - Venice, the Blue Rigi, the swirling Snow Storm are always astonishing (3.9). The last room, 'Landscape and Memory' has one of my favourite paintings, Turner's Norham Castle, Sunrise, but also reminds you of the variety of Constable's work - from his detailed drawing of trees on Hampstead Heath to his dramatic depiction of Stonehenge (Turner 3.5, Constable 3.7). 

So who came out on top? Well, Constable got a grand total of 221. And Turner's scores added up to... 221 as well! However, Constable, by my reckoning, had 72 paintings in the show and Turner just 66, so I declare Turner the winner.