Sean Scully: World famous Irish artist and son of Inchicore
Next Sunday, world-renowned and Dublin-born artist and sculptor Sean Scully will give this year’s T S Eliot Lecture at the Abbey Theatre. He tells Niall MacMonagle about his sh*t beginnings, four wives, being influenced by Seamus Heaney and what drives hi
ALTHOUGH he speaks “in a British Airways accent bought in Marks and Spencer”, painter and sculptor Sean Scully is a son of Inchicore. He was introduced as such during the unveiling of a Cuala Foundation plaque on August 1 at 7 Thomas Street West, by singer Susan McKeown. The plaque marks where he spent the first six months of his life.
Scully, with his wife, artist Liliane Tomasko, and son Oisin, was happy to revisit his first neighbourhood. He told the small, private gathering: “We gather ourselves around this point and create an atmosphere of love and friendship”.
Acclaimed Irish artist Sean Scully has worked in every prestigious museum in five continents and his paintings sell for over €1 million. One of the very few living artists to have a retrospective at MOMA and MET, and the first western artist to have had a major retrospective in China, he’s been photographed by Snowdon, and has lectured in Harvard, Princeton, and Goldsmiths.
Next Sunday, November 17, at 6pm, Scully will give this year’s T S Eliot Lecture at the Abbey Theatre.
Later, on that day in August, after the unveiling, at a reception in Richmond Barracks, he spoke of his parents who met in England during the war, father a pilot, his mother an ambulance driver.
“They met at a dance. My father couldn’t sing a note but he serenaded my mother (and she was a singer!). They fell in love, they abandoned the war, came back to Ireland. They said ‘We are not going to be in the war, we are going to be in love’”.
The Scullys are from Tipperary but Scully’s actual grandfather is a Jimmy Myles. John Scully, once married to his grandmother, isn’t his grandfather. That Scully was conscripted in World War I but left for Ireland and the 1916 Rising. Arrested, he “wouldn’t allow the British to shoot him” and “he hung himself ”. Scully explains the lineage. “That’s a real interesting dilemma because he is my grandfather because I’m the only one with his name.” So his widowed grandmother married Myles, John Scully’s best friend? He quickly sets the record straight. “No, she didn’t marry him, she just shagged him.” Jimmy Myles fathered Scully’s father [John Anthony Scully]; his grandmother’s five daughters were Scullys and she gave the name Scully to the boy she had with Jimmy Myles.
Scully adds, “I might not be related to him [John Scully] in blood but I’m related to him in attitude. I carry his name”. And his son Oisin now carries that name too.
Sean Scully, now 74, was born in the Rotunda and those early days in Dublin were so impoverished they were driven back to England when Scully was four. His father was imprisoned for desertion, Scully and his mother lived in one room in slums off the Old Kent Road and lived on fried white bread and lard.
Schooling began at St Joan of Arc Roman Catholic Primary School and “I had a fantastic street education, I was in a gang to survive”, but he wet the bed until the age of 20. He told The Guardian: “If you’d been brought up by my parents, you’d have wet the bed as well.”
Hospitalised with a broken nose, he met Jill who was “in for tonsils”. In the 2019 BBC2 documentary Unstoppable:
Sean Scully and the Art of Everything Scully calls it “a shotgun wedding, working class style”.
They were ill-suited, they had a son Paul, they broke up. Scully “didn’t see him at all, thought it was better that way”. When Paul died in a car crash on his 18th birthday “they didn’t tell me. I wrote to him when he was dead”. A traumatised Scully saw a therapist but was told “there’s nothing you want to change”. Scully just wanted to keep painting, the paintings dealt with those dark emotions and pain.
But his belief in God brought some solace. Scully [in Unstoppable] said “I believe in God and God believes in me” and tells me a story of his 17-year-old self, on a London building site. “I’ve fallen off the top of a building and somebody five minutes earlier had put some scaffold boards up on two floors below where I fell off and I just bounced on the scaffold board and we had a cup of tea to get over it. That seems to me to be a person who has some kind of protector.”
Scully says he was always an artist. “My aunt said that she and her husband wanted to build a house and I said ‘I’ll design it for you’. I was six. I immediately drew the house up for them. It was a bungalow and I’m sure they were humoured by this. But it just shows you how much conceit I had as an artist at a young age, just the audacity of it is interesting. Then, at art school, I became a very proficient portrait painter and draughtsman, and a figurative painter.”
Eleven art schools rejected him. Is he angry at that?
“Of course not. How the hell can you tell who’s going to be great and who’s not going to be great? You might as well do it blindfold. Also, I’ve a very interesting characteristic. I always remember history in a rosy manner. I remember it falsely and I think people have helped me more than they have. If I Google a little bit I find that it wasn’t the case. I’m a great revisionist of my own history. A positive revisionist. And I think that things were much easier or better than they were and it was always a huge struggle of course. Anyway, I got into art school and that was a dog fight and then I was in paradise.
“I was extreme at art school. There was no question at all that I wasn’t going to be what I am now. I was so grateful, so profoundly grateful.”
Married four times, to Jill, Rosemary, Catherine, Liliane, is he happier now? There’s a long pause. “Well, probably. I’ve been happy quite a few times in my life considering my sh*t beginnings. I have a very strong ability to transform; I think transformation is key to determining one’s position...
“In fact, I was talking to my ex-wife, whom I’m still very, very friendly with, this is Rosemary, and she said to me ‘Well I was looking for security’ and I thought to myself, well she wasn’t up to the ride, you know, she wasn’t up for the crazy ride that I was going on, so she wanted security and I thought to myself, ‘well we’re spinning around in space on a round rock and you’re going to die. There is no security’.” He also distrusts hope. “The other enemy, I think, is hope. ‘I hope it doesn’t rain’ has nothing to do with whether you hope it doesn’t rain. It’s going to rain if it wants to. It doesn’t care. Hope makes you powerless because it puts you in the position of the passive. I believe in love and transformation and work, commitment, truth, honesty.”
And so to another emotion. Of T S Eliot’s statement that ‘Anxiety is the handmaiden to creativity’, he says: “I would refine that a little and I would say that anxiety is cured, and fuelled, and made possible by art. In other words, when I make art it only makes me happy. And I found some way to make a pre-existing situation that was negative, very negative, into something that’s positive.”
Ireland is important to Sean Scully. In his early work, critics see echoes of intricate patterns in Irish manuscripts but he told me on the phone, “I don’t really believe in nationalism. I think nationalism is a macro-version of tribalism and we’re destroying ourselves because of nationalism. I believe that the mission of artists is to unify the world. We don’t talk about Korean or Australian or Russian artists. We talk more about the kind of art that they make. I’m not like British artists who make conceptual art. I’ve got nothing to do with them. The military arms of countries are exactly the direct opposite of what artists are doing. We try and make the world better and they’re trying to make the world worse.”
Hailed as ‘the greatest living artist of our time’; another critic dismissed his work as ‘very expensive wallpaper’. Known for his verticals, horizontals, stripes and bands of brilliantly combined colours, “the forms that I use generally stay constant. It’s as simple and as fundamentally mathematic as the music of Bach. Repetition is how we make the world. Particularly now. We live in repetition. There’s no point in talking about something being too repetitive. The world is made with repetition. I don’t know how many iPhones there are in the world, I’m using one right now, and I’m sure there’s millions and that certainly is the paradigm of repetition. So, I work with a rhythm. I’m capable of quite a broad range of emotions in my work. I can go from cold night to hot day.”
He grew up in cities but “I live in the countryside now [in Nyack, upstate New York]. I’m looking out my window at a little forest. And that’s why I started making sculptures so it’s had a big effect on me. I’m very
‘Seamus is tough in his poetry but profoundly elegant. I am profoundly elegant with the brush’
attached to the surface of things, to the surfaces in the world. And I love old things. I love things that have been stained, affected by the environment, that have been distressed”.
And yet your work has extraordinary depth?
“Yeah, it’s all surface and that’s the big difference between me and all the other abstract painters, all the other geometric abstract painters. Because what I’m doing is combining, in a sense, traditions that don’t fit. That actually aligns me somewhat with Seamus Heaney because Heaney is somewhat conservative, or let’s say seemingly conservative. He was combining Romanticism with a kind of Brutalism. He dealt with the materiality of things, the land, and one of my titles Boxes of Air [corten steel, 2015] comes from one of his bogland poems.
Is Scully a Brutalist?
“I think I’m quite a brutal person. I make paintings that are big and tough and very extreme in a certain way, physically very extreme. When I cut holes in my paintings, it’s quite a brutal thing to do, to a very beautiful painted surface. I don’t let the painting suffer from its own self-congratulatory vanity. I make an inset in it. I’m not wallowing in my own sensitivity or the tradition of Romanticism or mysticism or the vanity that can be brought about by too much of the expressive.
“There’s something quite working-class about the way I work, something quite proletariat so I pit these traditions against each other so they’re tough. Seamus is quite tough in his poetry but, of course, profoundly eloquent. And I am too. I am profoundly eloquent with the brush. But I don’t let it become a parody of itself. I check that. So I always remember the example of Picasso, because he’s willing to be ugly.”
Van Gogh, Mondrian, Rothko, James Joyce, Beckett, Eliot, Lorca, Heaney are important influences. All men? “Well, that’s not true because I very much like Agnes Martin and my favourite book is Out of Africa. There’s a line in Out of Africa which touches me deeply. She’s sitting out on the veranda of her house and she looks out at the horizon of the savannah, a morning mist is hanging over it and the wildebeests are being revealed as the mist steps back, as if God is making them, and placing them there, one at a time. What’s she’s saying is that the world is made every day and it’s a miracle. And this is what I believe.”
To Frank O’Connor’s question, ‘Is life beautiful but sad or is life sad but beautiful?’ Scully says: “I would say that life is beautiful but sad. However, it can, with discipline, persistence, belief and love, reverse the order of that. But that takes will and belief.” And to that childish question — choose just one work from the works you’ve made. “I would choose one of the Eleuthera paintings [2017], of Oisin on the beach. There’s a nice pink one that I like very much. It was on the poster for the Albertina [Museum exhibition in Vienna]. That’s very nice. What does Oisin make of his parents’ art? “I know he likes it; he understands that he lives a very privileged life. I have to tell you something pretty funny. Sometimes when we go to difficult locations we go with a crew, like a bunch of curators or advisors or writers, I have to get a jet because it’s the only way we can get there and he said to me one day that he likes the little airplanes more than the big ones. I said to him, ‘You’re going to have to be very successful, my dear’. It’s nice isn’t it?”
Though he’s speaking from America, Scully thinks America “the land of the weapon, the gun” and is anxious about Oisin growing up in Trumpland. “I detest Trump more than words can say. My hatred for him is, is, burning. And what he’s doing to the world — his unkindness, his dishonesty, his egocentric, ambitious vanity. He reminds me of other despots like Napoleon. He is a pathological maniac. And Oliver Cromwell who was a prototype for Adolf Hitler. I think America is not really a country. It’s an argument. I would describe it as a United States of Bickering and it’s very exhausting.”
For Oisin’s high school “I landed on the International School in Munich because Germany is a very interesting country and we have a big studio there and school is half an hour away. I drive him in 20 minutes now and for me it’s fun because he’s the DJ in the car on the way to school.”
In Unstoppable he sums up his success as “now like a f *cking runaway train”.
He has several huge studios. A travelling show to Peru, Columbia and Brazil is planned for 2021 and “I am doing something extremely special in the National Gallery of Budapest, a big retrospective in September 2020 that will travel around. That’s very special for me because Liliane’s entire family, going back hundreds of years, is all from Hungary. I’m really excited to do that”.
Some years back at a gala dinner for Scully in The Clarence Hotel, a Norwegian gallerist on my left had flown in that morning; on my right was Jacintha, a true Dub, who had grown up on the same street as Scully. During the meal Scully came over to see how Jacintha was getting on, to ask if she having a good time? That evening, this globally-famous artist was decent, caring, neighbourly and in that gesture he was every inch Inchicore.
At the TS Eliot lecture, Brid Brennan will read from The Four Quartets,
Barbara Dawson will introduce Scully and following his lecture, Belief versus Disbelief, Scully will be interviewed by Adrian Dunbar