INTERVIEW WITH SEAN SCULLY
Jörg Zutter

Jörg Zutter I was fortunate to be able to visit your exhibition where it originated at the Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere, Finland, and was so impressed by the selection of paintings, pastels, drawings and photographs. What influenced the choice of works: was it the architecture of the exhibition space; or was the purpose to give an overview of the last fifteen years?

Sean Scully The starting point was the acquisition of Wall of light silver black 2000 by the Sara Hildén Art Museum, after which the Saastamoinen Foundation in Helsinki also acquired a painting, Wall of light square grey 2000. The Foundation was interested in mounting an exhibition in Helsinki, but their building wasn’t finished. As Timo Vuorikoski, the Director of the Sara Hildén Art Museum, was also interested, the idea came up to organise an exhibition of works from the past decade or so, starting with Durango 1990, which can be seen as a work from the late 1980s and early1990s. It is a very austere, fierce, aggressive painting.

Indeed. It is only when you are standing in front of Durango that you can fully appreciate its physical impact.

It’s visceral. It has a projection — it’s coming forward in the middle, which is typical of my paintings from the 1980s. It’s the only painting in the exhibition that does this.

There are the two floating paintings of 2001–03, Grey white floating painting and Mooseurach floating painting. They project physically, but in a very different way.

The idea of making paintings very physical, through their projection, is relatively new. In the 1990s I distinguished between the flat ones and the projecting ones. In the 1980s I had combined them. Also in the 1990s I began to make paintings with more inserts, more windows, a bit like Bigland 1987–88, a work that anticipates the 1990s because it’s flat.

From the 1980s to the 1990s then there was a new step in your work; or was it a continuous evolution? Was it an important change in your practice?

I’m not interested in the idea of change. I am very interested in the notion of personal evolution, which is a different thing: a deepening of art in relationship to the subject.

So, it’s more about continuity — though the structural elements of your compositions and the palette have undergone change — the act of painting and the impact on the beholder has remained the same?

I reacted against empty formalism. I wanted to bring a sensibility and a structural point of view together over time (as a life is lived) so that the relation between the constituent aspects of the painting such as colour, surface, scale, form and subject would evolve and slowly transform the work to locate a different meaning — not simply a different form or shape. I always found the idea of Cézanne, walking up the mountain every day to paint it, a very moving metaphor for faith. Over time the paintings can appear similar, however they are changing slowly, as the sensibility of the painter and the medium of painting lose their separate identities.

The surfaces of my paintings have changed significantly over the years, and this has transformed the subject and the content of these works. They register differently in the world. If the spaces between the bars and the bands in my work gradually open, for example, the painting breathes differently. The background, signifying what was, becomes more forceful, as do the implied shifting relationships within the work. This is a way of transforming the content without changing the subject. The way that a subject is painted or expressed truly defines what it is. Phillip Guston defines this as a long preparation for a moment of innocence. I would take that further and say it’s a long process, through which it is possible to be innocent in a medium or to be able to love in a medium. Painting is extraordinarily nuanced and sensitive to touch. So it has the potential to change meaning through surface and interpretation.

Perhaps we could focus on Durango, which is a triptych: how does the evolution of the painting occur? Is the construction a conceptual process, or is it more responsive? Did you know quite early what you wanted to do? Is it like architecture?

This work, Durango — which as you say is strongly architectural — could still be divided differently. It could be divided into three pieces and painted as three pieces, but what is interesting to me about the work is that it’s a triptych that’s in a fight with an all-over painting. It’s both, and that’s something that runs through my work a lot, the idea of the dialectic, the divided idea, the double idea. In a way, it looks like an enormous altarpiece, because this particular structure has religious connotations. The way it’s painted is almost violent; it has a kind of force in it that makes it difficult to negotiate with. And in another way it looks like a wasteland. It’s not a painting that is full of hope.

There are some works that seem to be more balanced and dictated by a pure logic, closer to an arithmetical solution than an emotional response. A group of works seem to be inspired by the order of a checkerboard. Works like Union yellow 1994 appear less dramatic and more rational.

I’m very attracted to simple or basic systems of ordering. The way things can be put together in fours or fives, sixes or sevens, carries with it a strange and mysterious logic. If I put two panels together and one is divided with an even number — six for example — it tends to feel balanced and completed. But if the number of units is odd, like five, it can run on forever. So these rhythms, as well as proportional size differences are put up against each other in diptychs and triptychs. This creates a feeling of balance and imbalance, and the complex colour plus the edges adds enormously to the possibility.

Architecture is built to define, but colour and touch can be used to subvert and confuse definition. They make what is clear, as an idea, unclear or complex, as an experience. The colour I use has no name or clear message. It is moody or melancholic at times. It is painted over old colour, so it is colour replaced by colour. The colour on top is influenced by the colour underneath. This becomes a complicated experience that is difficult to unravel and, in a sense, it is like history itself. It is made in layers and one attitude is replaced by another. But what was there will always be there, as a shadow or a memory and that will permanently influence the present. In other words, whatever has been will always to some extent exist.

So, the way I use and think in colour is complex and emotional. This is working in tandem with an ordering attitude that is direct and clear. But it is only direct and clear at the beginning, when it is an idea. As it is painted, it is given body and light so that the whole situation becomes complex and open to simultaneous experiences. It is direct, but not simple. The mystical power of simple divisions and numbering systems is powerful in and of itself. I have brought it into a relationship with European painting, which has its roots in our past.

What I like about Union yellow is that on the left side you’ve used a very minimal approach, and on the right it’s more colourful, more expressive. You’ve put the two parts together, and they are not a happy couple: their structures are different, they are not attuned, they remain in opposition. From Durango to here I see a kind of logic in its disruption.

The work’s title Union reappears in a lot of my prints, drawings and watercolours, as well as quite a few paintings. The idea is this: just by, on one side, magnifying the motif of the other and changing the colour, you create a disruption, a crisis in a relationship. So these paintings have the title Union, but the union is in crisis. That’s the point.

In some of the paintings there’s a sense of harmony, a very engaging mood, while in others the union is obviously difficult. What is your aim — to challenge?

A lot of my work is concerned with relationship and disruption. The fact that I’m an immigrant is very fundamental to me. It’s one of the reasons I identify with Mark Rothko so strongly, because he faced the same problems of being a young immigrant. It gives you a view of things coming together and coming apart, coming and going, coming and going. It’s very big for me. There’s always this duality: crisis of identity and connection, separateness and connection. You have it in Bigland: a section seems to be coming off but it doesn’t because it connects with the red, which is a strong colour. But it’s calling across a huge space. I love this painting.

Some of your canvases appear directly related to architectural structures like street patterns or shopfronts in specific cities or suburbs. Your photographs of wooden barracks in Santo Domingo suggest this visual correspondence.

I am extremely engaged by my surroundings. I grew up in the rough parts of urban London. The colours of wet, dirty, grey walls are attractive to me. When I travel I never go to clean or cleaned up places. I’m really happy in slums. When I was in Brazil, and I visited the Favelas, I was totally at ease in that environment. I like the people, and they seem to like me. Maybe they are bemused by me, I don’t know. I’m not really looking for specific information, in the sense of this or that colour or structure. But things always happen. Something happens, and it seems vital to me.

I think Picasso had a strong connection to blood and to the land. One can see this in the power of his line and the strength of his surface. I have educated myself, but that hasn’t really affected my fundamental relationship with the ground and with the physical world that feeds me. Miró believed that energy comes up through the ground and into your body. I believe the same.

A technical issue: the depth of your canvases has been quite significant for some time, measuring ten centimetres or so. Tell me about the stretcher problems you face.

The problem with stretchers is that because they’re flexible they’re also weak as a foundation, so they’re always moving under the painting. This seems to me to be a major problem. Whatever you’re painting on, it has to be firm, otherwise there are technical difficulties. So I prefer to make my canvases rigid, and if there’s a problem later on — in one hundred years — someone can dismantle them and rebuild something solid in a lightweight twenty-first-century material that hasn’t yet been invented and remount the painting. I think it’s a perfect solution — better in the long term for the painting.

Let’s talk about the structure of specific works, especially those that appear to be diptychs or triptychs, and those that have inserts. Secret sharer 1989, for example, is this a diptych or a single painting?

It’s a diptych with an insert. The title of this work was taken from a story by Joseph Conrad — another immigrant I identify with strongly. He was Polish and he wrote in English. I love the way he writes because there’s something awkward about it. He puts the words in the wrong place. This gives his writing an incredible power. I think it’s a little bit like my work. The insert in Secret sharer is like the passenger in the story. It’s hidden. You have trouble seeing it. So it’s kind of a secret.

Is the insert a way to create a point, like a figure?

It is like a figure, something inserted that gives you the sense of a body against a body, where the red and yellow meet, so you get the idea of a narrative, maybe a voyage.

That idea leads me to ask about the paintings where you create a hole in the canvas — a window — and then close it again with a barely visible insert.

 I’m really not interested in the idea of harmony in art — it’s too easy and it doesn’t actually produce anything. And the problem with a lot of abstract painting is that it doesn’t really express anything. I think to express something you need some kind of pressure, you need a discourse. Fitting and not fitting, that’s how relationships are made. This is how we define ourselves in the world. If you have endless easy harmony, and people just say ‘that’s a beautiful painting’, ‘that’s a beautiful painting’, on and on, at the end of the exhibition they’ll be practically falling asleep from boredom. That’s not what I want.

Four large mirrors 1999 is a wonderful series. I understand that it’s necessary to present the paintings close together, as in Tampere, to show the viewer your experience of painting the four canvases simultaneously.

First of all, I would say that I’m not trying to show people anything: I’m not trying to explain anything. What I’m really trying to do is create an experience. This work is an orchestral response to one of my basic ideas. I have several recurring ideas, and one of them is the idea of the mirror, which of course goes back to the split personality and to looking at one’s own reflection: to narcissism in fact. It’s very interesting that vampires don’t have a reflection; it’s because they’re not human. Only humans can speak with their own reflection, learn from their own reflection. It’s a very human quality to be able to look at yourself, study your own reflection, and gain understanding as a result. So the mirror and the window are inventions fundamental to our viewing and understanding of the world. The mirror allows us to look at ourselves and the window allows us to look at the world. I’m fascinated by both.

And the mirror also makes left right, and right left.

Yes. This work is reminiscent of Matisse in the sense that it becomes hugely expansive. It’s really a symphonic work, because it starts out big and goes on. It takes the idea of a mirror and through multiplying the painting by four it ends up as something kind of ecstatic and environmental. When it was shown in Tampere it didn’t really work because there wasn’t enough room for it. But when it’s hung in a space where there is plenty of height and width and light the rhythm of the work can continue. The idea is that a rhythm is created by the brush, the human action, and the endless horizontal lines. This horizontal rhythm jumps across from one canvas to the other in a continuum. The whole room should be inhabited by this musical sense. One could say it’s related to drumming, or perhaps to playing Bach.

There could also be a painting where this concept is compressed into one work rather than expanded as in Four large mirrors. It can either be a long story full of imaginative details, like a romantic symphony, or a small, almost conceptual reduction of an idea, as in a piano work, which can be very complex.

Right. If you take one little painting and you paint in layers, then what you would be doing is making a sonata. But when you spread it out it becomes kind of heroic or expansive, no longer compressed. Falling figure 2002 is obviously a figure-ground painting. The figure is made up of three stacked elements, like suitcases, boxes or whatever. But instead of being stacked up they are falling into the painting. It’s a reality you can only have in a painting.

The painting Mooseurach from 2002: its title is the name of this Bavarian village where you live and work when you are teaching at the Art Academy in Munich.

Yes. It was the first canvas I painted here. That’s why it has never been sold. I find it interesting that it was influenced by the countryside — the green and the yellow. I could feel straight away when I moved here that the landscape was going to have an effect on my painting. So this one I named after the place, which has a strange name, Mooseurach. But there’s something very interesting happening in this painting: the bands, the bars start to open up, the spaces between the bars start to become illuminated from behind, as if they were back-lit. This is common with a lot of these works. There is a ribbon of colour running through the painting.

If we are to understand the structural composition of your painting in relationship to a musical composition, as such is it an expression of emotion?

That’s another thing in my work, this battle between system and emotion, the need for system to be overcome by feeling. Donald Kuspit has said that the language of my art is absolutely contemporary because it looks computer-generated, but the way it is painted is full of pathos. It creates this kind of schism because I’m a man of the nineteenth century and I’m making paintings in the twenty-first century, with the materials of the twenty-first century. Really, I’m somebody who could be on a horse, wielding a sword — very physical. I feel very free. This is also why it’s not interesting for me to work in London, because in London you’re not free. People want to know if it’s art from the 1980s or the 1990s, or how it fits in the twentieth century. It’s all a kind of fashion. Tomorrow there’ll be a new trend and this lot will become obsolete. It’s all about art of the now.

I’m interested in the idea behind the 2002 painting Sea wall. Is it like a dam that protects the beholder from the physical and emotional impact of the stormy sea?

This is one of my favourites, painted with a lot of this bluey-grey colour. I saw it as a wall against the ocean, so it’s really a northern romantic painting.

Gustave Courbet painted many fantastic Waves in the 1860s, which are really strong pictures, with a lot of movement and emotion in them.

Well he was painting the wave; I’m painting the wall that stops the wave. But it’s saturated by the colour of the wave. You can see that all the reds have been almost completely painted out. I think this painting has a very strong relationship with Edouard Manet. French and Spanish painting have been a major influence on me. But the relationship between the corporeal and the spiritual is also important in my work. This separates me from other people of my generation. The corporeal is hugely important in Spanish painting. What I’ve always loved in Manet is the sense of slow, monumental feeling. The way the paint is put down has a certain slowness to it. This is what gives the painting its monumentality and poetry. And this is what I wanted to capture in Sea wall.

In Sea wall you’ve created a sophisticated painting with only a few colours. Earlier you used a wider range of colours, but in this work there’s a lot of variation in the grey, white and black.

The red underneath is very important. It influences the painting in a very subversive way.

Yellow bar from 2002 seems more expressive than Sea wall, more ‘unfinished’, with several different colours, and colours that are behind.

With these later works the movement in the painting is far stronger and the sense of imperfection is also stronger. There’s a lot of yellow — there’s yellow underneath that is lost, and there’s yellow that is not lost. There’s a sense of the irretrievable that’s quite strong in these paintings. I think they’re very interesting psychologically, not just as paintings, but as a platform where loss and retrieval are played out.

In Canberra we’ll be seeing your big colourful painting Wall of light desert day, painted last year in New York.

It’s extremely colourful for a big painting. There are openings from behind running all the way through the painting. The colour is extremely important. I think of it as desert colour. And the title Wall of light desert day is significant because the idea of the desert is to me like the notion of a sacred land, a land that hasn’t been defiled. The other interesting thing about Wall of light desert day is that it has colours in it like Ayers Rock (Uluru). This strange kind of dead-red oxide colour, like a sandy red colour, I use quite a lot.

As an abstract painter, for you a landscape does not mean a specific landscape, it’s not a geographical place. Is it more a memory of a place or an idea?

I’m not painting the particular, in the sense that I’m painting the particular things that make something recognisable. Obviously I want to be universal, but not vague. This is really the fundamental issue with abstraction: how to give it the communicative possibility of a painted surface with body and soul, and at the same time realise the universality and freedom of abstraction.

For example, if I paint a work called Angel 1983 (private collection), which has a drawing on the left side, and blurred grey bands on the right side, I am thinking of something like wingsor a book. A book can also be thought of as wings, as when it is opened, it lights up, and communicates knowledge, and when it is closed it is in darkness and remains passive. I thought of this painting when I was in an aeroplane thinking about angels, and I retained the idea in my mind and painted it the next day in the studio in New York.

The same could be said of Mooseurach. This is different though, since I painted it here in my studio in Mooseurach, in the heart of the forest. There is a special light here. There is a lot of water in the air and the colours are dark and vivid. I dedicated the painting to this place. It is affectionate in the sense that it is modest in scale. It’s not huge and public. It’s a personal dedication. Though, of course, it is not a landscape. It’s a painting that is resolutely abstract yet open to association.

I’d like to know more about the conception of the Holly series that you’re working on at the moment, which will also come to Canberra.

I’m still working on the small ones. There’s a beautiful story behind them, and since I’m Irish I like to tell stories. I have this friend, the first person to show my work in Europe many years ago. He showed my stuff in the Museum für Subkultur, which was an apartment in the Turkish Quarter of Berlin, the dead end of the Berlin Wall. Anyway, we lost touch, and then we made contact last year and immediately became friends again. He showed me this little space he’s running in Aichach, where he directs the Kunstverein. It has a preservation order on it because it’s a cow house, but it looks like a very low church. When my mother died, I felt I would like to do something for her. And she had died just around the time I was reunited with my friend, so everything came together in a spirit of loss and recovery, which is fundamental to the message in my paintings — this idea of coming and going. So I thought of holding an exhibition dedicated to my mother in this cow house that looks like a church. I think my mother, who had a very wicked sense of humour, would be pleased that her memorial exhibition is in a cow house. She would like the irony of it. Because sometimes to insult other women she would say ‘She’s a fucking cow’. My mother was a very rough woman.

She liked the idea of you becoming an artist rather than a petit bourgeois?

She loved it, she was very vital — there’s a picture of her up there. You know she was a great dancer, a world champion Tango dancer. I decided to do something that would include a big painting, like a portrait or an altarpiece. And the little paintings would be a bit like the small paintings I used to see in a church with a tin roof I used to go to when I was a small child in London after the war. They were the Stations of the Cross. So I put fourteen small paintings and one large painting in the cow house. And this is what we will recreate in Canberra. It’s not separate works, but actually a single work consisting of fifteen parts. I think life is full of splendour. Who would think I would meet my friend again and do this exhibition in a cow house, which would then be transported to Australia?

I remember reading interviews in which you explain that you rely heavily on the traditions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Could we talk about the roots of your art and your feelings about tradition? Do you still draw inspiration from the past? Would you agree with me that without a past, there is no future?

I certainly don’t like the idea of the present replacing and destroying the past. I see life and spirituality as a kind of continuum in which we honour not only the present and the future, but also the past. I’ve never been a fashionable artist, and my work has never been supported as a fashionable phenomenon, like that of Julian Schnabel or Andy Warhol for example. But there are enough people who support this other voice, this other way of doing things, and my work has gradually infused itself into the culture. It’s connected to many other things, all other painting. I love Courbet, I’m crazy for his paintings, the way he paints the side of a hill — it’s so powerful. When I’m painting I think of this, these slabs that are penetrable and have light in them. I love painters like Cimabue and Piero della Francesca; seeing Piero’s fresco of the Resurrection in the Pinacoteca Comunale in Sansepolcro is a very powerful experience for me. In a way, I would have to say I don’t really have any interest in contemporary art.

It’s not really a question of whether something is new; it’s a question of whether it’s any good, whether it has meaning. Because new, you never know how it’s going to go. You think video is going to replace painting and then suddenly painting replaces video. Painting is incredibly enduring, because it’s an activity where the hand and the spirit and the mind combine together in this gesture, and it’s compressed into movement, the making of something. We’re never going to get away from this, it’s fundamental.

You are not afraid to express yourself directly; where other artists may seek technical assistance in order to achieve perfectly executed work, you are not concerned, because you have never insisted on technical perfection.

I’m not interested in perfection.

Is painting for you a humble act?

It’s important to remember what you’re doing, and what you’re doing is trying to make a subjective, poetic reality by simply putting paint on a surface. And that is the simplest thing you could possibly do. Even monkeys know how to use sticks to get ants out of trees. So you’re doing something that’s a very simple thing, and it’s important to remember that, it’s utterly humble. And you have to be humble, on a certain level, to be able to make it successful. Once you get fancy and over-technical, once you get too many assistants you’re finished as a painter, because that sense of connection, which is very spiritual, very emotional, is broken. I make all my own paintings, in this room. Nobody makes any of the paintings but me. It’s very important to me, and that’s why I’ve been able to do this very simple thing for such a long time, in the face of resistance — because of this connection with tradition. If you have that connection, you’re really not that vulnerable.

In the lecture you gave in 1992 at Harvard you were saying that painting for you is a primitive act and, as such, on the one hand it is something that comes from the heart and has a true message, and on the other hand risks being overlooked in a highly technical and inhuman world.

I’ve said repeatedly that painting is a refuge or antidote to the spiritually flattening and depersonalising tendency of the virtual technological world. The more artificial the world becomes, the more one is forced to experience the world and the world of relationships through a TV or a computer screen, and the more extreme is the need for a human surface. Painting is uniquely placed to offer that.

Like a book, a painting sleeps when it is not being looked at. It is possible to ignore a painting. A painting is mute and yet mysterious. Naturally it is possible to overlook a painting in a world that is populated with screaming images. But these images are almost exclusively empty and exhausting. With a great painting, more is radiating that one can understand logically. In that sense, even though it slumbers on the wall, when it is engaged an emotional experience can take place in a moment. So it functions well in a world of momentary engagement. A glance is enough to start it up.

Do you still have a lot to explore and to say?

I’m not exhausted yet — we’ll have to see next week! If you see yourself as a vessel that gets gradually emptied out, then of course, eventually you will become creatively exhausted. But if you are in a living, working relationship with life, that shouldn’t happen, because you are organically filling up and emptying out. So, in other words, you are porous. Your body wears out, though that’s another matter. We are mortal.

16 January 2004, Mooseurach, Königsdorf.