Overview

The Language of Light is an authorised selection from Sean Scully’s lectures, notebooks and interviews, over the course of forty years, and provides an intimate overview of his work as painter, printmaker, sculptor and photographer. Scully’s reflections on his art are sustained throughout by his insights into the work of other artists, past and present: from Chardin to Morandi, from Rothko to Van Gogh, from Mondrian to Paul Klee or Gerhard Richter. The volume is equally an autobiographical sequence, reflecting on the artist’s Irish origins and early childhood, his years of wandering and achievement – from Newcastle to New York – and his moment-by-moment responses to the world around him. As Paul Keegan writes in his introduction, ‘this book about painting is about many other things too, which gives its proceedings an outdoors atmosphere, an air of looking around’. The texts are often brief and invariably candid. They reveal a writer who paints, as much as a painter who writes. The book is organised into sections: Life Studies, Stories, Americana, Places, Portraits. The Language of Light contains forty or so images from Scully’s own work, representing his geometric abstractions and stripe motifs, his sculpture and photography, as well as a selection of supporting images from the work of other artists. The edition has benefited from the assistance of the Scully Archive, and has the approval of the artist.

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9781843519157

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Author Information

Sean Scully is a world-renowned abstract painter born in Dublin and raised in London. He is known for his impactful and internationally recognisable paintings balancing dynamic bands of colour in rhythmic formulations. In recent years, Scully’s explorations of space and volume have continued into large-scale sculptural works – monumental and megalithic-feeling stone blocks that weigh down on the land, as well as airy structures in Corten steel that open up and interact with the landscape. Scully was named a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2013 and has received honorary degrees from institutions such as the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston and the National University of Ireland, among others. Scully now lives between New York and Germany.

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