Sean Scully’s Blue paintings channel childhood blues in Paris show

Sean Scully, whom the writer calls "the greatest living abstract painter", is showing a new group of Blue paintings at Thaddaeus Ropac gallery in Paris. The works pair long, textured blue notes with black, red and brown to create what the piece describes as a slow, sad music without words.

Scully paints rectangles, squares and strips of colour that abut and slide into one another; he likens abstract painting to instrumental music and contrasts it with pop art, saying it is something you feel rather than describe. The article notes that some of his new paintings colour-match John Coltrane’s Blue Train and Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, and quotes him: "I got interested in blue because I had the blues." Born in Dublin in 1945 and raised in London, Scully says he is "Anglo-Irish" and describes an "irresolvable" tension between order and abandon.

The piece recounts his troubled childhood—he was "the product of a completely smashed-up family" and was taken away from nuns at seven, an experience he says led to a nervous breakdown and the loss of his religion, which he has attempted to "put back together" through art. After training in England as a figurative artist, Scully moved to New York in 1975 and has since positioned himself against what he sees as an emotionally emptied American avant garde.

Key Topics

Culture, Sean Scully, Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, Blue Paintings, Abstract Painting