Inside the Kentish Town warehouse studio of artist Sean Scully
'I've always wanted my art to have an effect, to communicate emotionally - and globally,' says Sean Scully, standing in his still relatively new north London studio, amid several of his vast, luminous and distinctively gridded abstract paintings. Born in Ireland and raised in London, Sean had, since 1975, been predominantly based in New York, and his work, which is infused with ideas relating to blues music, Catholic iconography, Russian suprematism, Islamic geometry, and more, is part of over 150 public collections across five continents.
The return to London in September 2023 was prompted by the schooling of his teenage son, Oisin. Sean has bought a house in Hampstead Village and taken a five-year lease on this four-storey warehouse in nearby Kentish Town. His paintings aside, there is a spareness to the space, which it would be tempting to attribute to the temporary nature of his plans. However, photographs of his main studio in Tappan, New York (there are others in Aix-en-Provence in France and in Germany) suggest that the set-up is actually his ideal - down to apparently identical trestle tables. He works alone on the third floor, with storage on the floors below. The floor above is used by his wife, the artist Liliane Tomasko, whose choice of music seeps through the ceiling.
Enthusing about his love of London, Sean speaks of how they walk to the studio across the Heath every morning: 'Then I do pencil drawings, paintings on my iPhone. That's how I get ready.' He works from buckets onto canvas or aluminium, 'building up' the paintings using just six base colours: yellow, red, green, blue, black and white. The alternating of matt and gloss that affects the dimensional laws of the picture plane is, he says, inadvertent, and the palette of each work develops instinctively, impacted by place: 'Here, I'm painting with a kind of claustrophobic humidity that you don't get in America. This city is like a jungle; when I walk out, I'm being hit all the time by plants coming out of people's gardens. There's an intimacy and an intensity, and the green is coming through in the work, and the surfaces have got rougher.'
When we visit, Sean is preparing for exhibitions in New York, Barcelona and Hamburg, as well as Daegu in South Korea and Chengdu in China. His practice encompasses sculpture, printmaking and poetry, and visible in the studio are new figurative paintings for Jack and the Wolf, a children's book he wrote with Oisin when he was five. However, he qualifies their existence with the statement: 'Abstraction is central to my work.' Notably, early-European abstraction came with utopian ideals. 'We believed we could overcome nationalism,' says Sean. 'I still believe art can bring nations together, that it can save the world, and that's my basis. '
‘Sean Scully, La Pedrera, Barcelona, Spain, until July 6; ’Sean Scully: The Albee Barn, Montauk', Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, US, May 11 - September 21; 'Sean Scully Stories', Bucerius Kunst Forum, Hamburg, Germany, June 27 - November 2: lapedrera.com | parrishart.org | buceriuskunstforum.de | ropac.net | lissongallery.com
Joshua Monaghan1/5Detail of Blue Anxious Boy, 2024, oil on aluminium.
Joshua Monaghan2/5Sean has painting shoes in each studio.
Joshua Monaghan3/5Winsor & Newton paints.
Joshua Monaghan4/5Wall in Brown, 2024, now in the Sheffield Museums collection.
Joshua Monaghan5/5A trolley in front of Arles London Vincent, 2024, oil on aluminium.
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