Artists in pictures: Sean Scully
Here’s Sean Scully with two of his gigantic paintings, a good abstract expressionist soldier back from battle, covered in the blood of his victims. You’d think this rather obsolete content would upstage the paintings, but it doesn’t (and I don’t necessarily have a problem with that content anyway). In fact, you get a real sense of the physicality of the paintings here, a sense you don’t really get, by the way, looking at them in reproduction. (Apparently the sides of Scully’s canvases are also painted; this too would add to their monolithic solidity.) The paintings, though they really do bear those old-fashioned qualities, sought and admired by the abstract expressionists but laughed out of town today, toughness and masculinity, come off pretty well, not nearly as cold, or as easily pigeonholed, as you’d expect given their ancestry. Scully himself looks somewhat more anachronistic than his paintings do. I feel like he may accidentally have gotten himself pressed into that mold in the photo.
In other photos, some in which Scully is seated, we see an artist applying paint not with a Herculean trowel, but carefully, with a relatively small brush - and check out that posture in the photo on the right: that’s a guy who has to be careful about his back if I ever saw one. There. Fine. But I still like the first photo, just like I do pictures of Jackson Pollock in his barn or, heck, Nick Nolte in Scorsese’s Life Lessons, where no artist cliché is spared. As long as painting is an art and not a science, as long as painters start a painting not knowing what they’re after, there will always be some air of romance in it. And whatever the nature of the attraction to getting messily engrossed in useless work, I don’t think I’m the only one who’s feels it.
Artists in pictures: Sean Scully
Here’s Sean Scully with two of his gigantic paintings, a good abstract expressionist soldier back from battle, covered in the blood of his victims. You’d think this rather obsolete content would upstage the paintings, but it doesn’t (and I don’t necessarily have a problem with that content anyway). In fact, you get a real sense of the physicality of the paintings here, a sense you don’t really get, by the way, looking at them in reproduction. (Apparently the sides of Scully’s canvases are also painted; this too would add to their monolithic solidity.) The paintings, though they really do bear those old-fashioned qualities, sought and admired by the abstract expressionists but laughed out of town today, toughness and masculinity, come off pretty well, not nearly as cold, or as easily pigeonholed, as you’d expect given their ancestry. Scully himself looks somewhat more anachronistic than his paintings do. I feel like he may accidentally have gotten himself pressed into that mold in the photo.
In other photos, some in which Scully is seated, we see an artist applying paint not with a Herculean trowel, but carefully, with a relatively small brush - and check out that posture in the photo on the right: that’s a guy who has to be careful about his back if I ever saw one. There. Fine. But I still like the first photo, just like I do pictures of Jackson Pollock in his barn or, heck, Nick Nolte in Scorsese’s Life Lessons, where no artist cliché is spared. As long as painting is an art and not a science, as long as painters start a painting not knowing what they’re after, there will always be some air of romance in it. And whatever the nature of the attraction to getting messily engrossed in useless work, I don’t think I’m the only one who’s feels it.
