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.
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