"Born in Ireland, raised in England and with studios in America, Germany and Spain, Sean Scully RA is an avowedly international artist. Sam Phillips visits the painter in his cavernous space in Barcelona.
Characterised by rhythmic arrangements of rectilinear shapes, Sean Scully RA’s abstracts have always elicited associations with architecture. And as I walk with the artist through the streets of Barcelona’s affluent neighbourhood of Dreta de l’Eixample where he has periodically lived for over a decade, he describes details of the elegant five-storey buildings we pass, from the warm colours of their 19th-century stone to the ornate patterns of iron at their imposing doorways.
Soon one of these doorways is opened by Scully and we are plunged into the dark. As I strain to see where we are in the blackness, we move through into a larger space barely lit by what comes through its skylights. I say to Scully that most people would have turned on the lights by now, but he replies that he is at ease in the dark.
....
When the halogens are on I realise the sheer size of Scully’s studio, which is one of three in which the Irish-born, London-raised artist works – the others are in Manhattan and Munich. Stretching back for 50 metres, with a similar size basement below, the sparse, white-painted space is on a scale one can’t anticipate from the building’s narrow fin de siècle façade. On the ground floor a low table hosts plastic containers of oil, while the focus of the basement is a pool table – when Scully moved from London to New York in the 1970s, he played as a bar-room pool shark to help make ends meet." (bron: Royal Academy, foto: Nick Ballon)
> Sean Scully
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