Skip to main content

Sean Scully, 'Landline Green and White', 2014

 

With a dark bedrock at the base of the piece, leading up to a green, almost translucent horizon at the top, Sean Scully presents his Landline Green White as a collection of parallel lines of colour. As if mapping out the layers of earth up towards the heavens, this series was inspired by the Irish landscape, and evokes the Abstract Expressionists working primarily in New York during the 1960s and 1970s. Despite its simplistic formal qualities and restricted colour palette, Scully still invites a viewer to question the meaning of his monumental painting, whilst using interesting materials to flex his capabilities as an artist, and show the range of oils in only six blocks of colour. 

Using aluminium as a ground, Scully instantly takes Abstract Expressionism a stage further through technique, adding a modernist undercurrent to this well-known artistic movement. Giving a shininess to the palette, the aluminium also betrays the painted strokes of Scully's hand, distinct in the upper portions of the work in particular. The viewer's eye begins to notice these imperfections; each line between colour, for instance, is far from uniform, but instead there are peaks and troughs, changes in thickness and thinness, to the separation of colours. Equally, a white dash makes up the centre of the top layer of Landline, which draws the eye in, as it breaks through the tight colour scheme. The ground is also revealed in the middle green section, and these moments of whiteness sweep across the piece as a whole. They serve to prove the evidence of Scully's hand, appreciating the nuances of both automatic painting but also human error, where lines are not smooth, but clearly constructed by the human eye.

There is an obvious debt to Rothko in Scully's Landline series, which moves beyond his usual approach of intersecting blocks of colour. Equally, Scully references many other artists who took on the genre of Colour Field painting - Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Clifford Still and more. The choice of a limited, harmonious colour palette, the linearity of paint application, and the sense of a window into an unknown world, location or landscape, certainly aligns Scully with abstract artists past and present. Additionally, his imitation of Rothko in particular, proves that the impact of Abstract Expressionists among contemporary practitioners remains strong, alongside a market appeal for this type of artwork. The paintings by Rothko and the like have often been compared to landscapes in art historical discourse, which as Scully has noted, is a feature of his Landline series, drawing inspiration from Ireland, and the gap between land and the horizon. However, we still, as viewers, remain unsure if Landline Green White is supposed to evoke a place, or a feeling, or both. It is an isolating canvas of nothingness, sucking us in, yet at the same time it brings us into a discussion to question both its form and associated meanings. Perhaps it is a window into our world. Perhaps it is something else entirely. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mark Rothko, 'Light Red over Black', 1957

  My eye is not drawn to the painting itself but the title of the painting, 'Light Red Over Black'. We would automatically think that the black is on top of a red background, but Rothko has flipped this around, subverting the title just like he subverting the meaning of what it was to be an artist and what Art actually was. During this time, art was going through rapid changes, with abstract expressionism coming into full force (Rothko, Pollock). But Rothko showed that all this change was for the good, even if for him, it was short lived.  The colour red in this painting is searing and the black struggles to fully cover this velvety border, especially at the bottom of the canvas. Unlike the black squares which have a hazy quality to their edges, the red is clear and impregnable. It is hard to figure out what this represents - the Tate has suggested a window perhaps, but if it is a window then what are we looking out into? Perhaps it is night, or perhaps the viewer is catching ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Egon Schiele, 'Dead Mother', 1910

  My eye is drawn to the hand. Those long, bony fingers are so characteristic of Schiele but here they are particularly skeletal and deathly – the veins seem to have been injected with poison. And they are a warning right in the foreground of the painting that keeps the viewer at bay as an outsider to this incredibly intimate relationship between mother and child, and sets the tone of death and mortality which hangs over the whole image. The mother cradles her child in a womb-like shroud, alluding to childbirth and the death of the mother explained in the title. She seems desperate to feel that bodily connection with her child, highlighted by the emphasis on her craned neck as she tries to connect to the baby. There is a clear link between the mother’s bent neck and the child’s bent neck, again emphasising their longing to be with each other. However, the darkness around the child is almost like ropes, with flecks of white in the painting making it look as though the darkness is wo...
Post a Comment
Read more

M.K. Ciurlionis, 'Funeral Symphony VII', 1903

  There are many who have been left out of the art historical canon and Lithuanian artist and composer Mikalojus Ciurlionis is one of them. Producing over 200 musical works and 300 paintings, his career was extensive, prolific and multifaceted. Yet, he was a 'genius cursed by fate' according to artist and critic Alexandre Benois, dying from exhaustion in 1911. Praised within his lifetime, Ciurlionis is virtually invisible today, especially to a Western viewer. Describing one artwork by Ciurlionis is not enough to appreciate his diversity and synthesis of artforms - pastels, as this work shows, vignettes, oils, designs for stained glass, even abandoning the easel for cardboard. More importantly, he was indebted to the Lithuanian landscape. Ichiro Kato refers to him as 'Lithuanian in nature and national feeling...a genius from the Baltic lands', reflected in works including  Serenity depicting idyllic, peaceful settings of mountains and lakes, devoid of humanity. Like man...
Post a Comment
Read more