Monday, October 10, 2011

A little bit about Dublin, Ireland.


A little bit about Dublin, Ireland.

Dublin (meaning "town of the hurdled ford"), is the capital and most populous city of Ireland. It is a primate city serving a population of approximately 1.8 million within the Greater Dublin Area. The English name for the city is derived from the Irish name Dubh Linn, meaning "black pool". Dublin is situated near the midpoint of Ireland's east coast, at the mouth of the River Lifey, and at the centre of the Dublin Region.

Originally founded as a Viking settlement, it evolved into the Kingdom of Dublin and became the island's primary city following the Norman invasion Norman invasion. The city expanded rapidly from the 17th century, and for a brief period was the second largest city within the British Empire and the fifth largest in Europe. However, Dublin entered a period of stagnation following the Act of Union of 1800, but remained the economic centre for most of the island. Following the partition of Ireland in 1922, the new parliament, the Oireachtas, was located in Leinster House. Dublin became the capital of the Irish Free State and later of the Republic of Ireland.

Similar to the other cities of Cork, Limerick, Galway, and Waterford, Dublin is administered separately from its respective county with its own city council. The city is currently ranked 29th in the Global Financial Centres Indexand is listed by the GaWC as a global city, with a ranking of Alpha, placing Dublin among the top 30 cities in the world. It is a historical and contemporary cultural centre for the country, as well as a modern centre of education, the arts, administration, economy and industry.




Flag.


History.

Toponymy

Although the area surrounding Dublin Bay has been inhabited by humans since prehistoric times, the writings of Ptolemy, the Egyptian astronomer and cartographer, provide possibly the earliest reference to a settlement he described as Eblana Civitas in about 140 AD. The name Dublin is derived from the Irish name Dubh Linn, meaning "black pool". Baile Átha Cliath, meaning "town of the hurdled ford", is the common name for the city in modern Irish.Áth Cliath is a place name referring to a fording point of the River Liffey in the vicinity of Father Mathew Bridge. Baile Átha Cliath was an early Christian monastery which is believed to have been situated in the area of Aungier Street, currently occupied by Whitefriar Street Carmelite Church.

The subsequent Scandinavian settlement was on the River Poddle, a tributary of the Liffey in an area now known as Wood Quay. The Dubh Linn was a lake used to moor ships and was connected to the Liffey by the Poddle. These lakes were covered during the early 18th century, and they were largely abandoned as the city expanded. The Dubh Linn was situated where the Castle Garden is now located, opposite the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin Castle. Táin Bó Cuailgne, also known as The Cattle Raid of Cooley, refers to Dublind rissa ratter Áth Cliath, meaning Dublin, which is called Ath Cliath.


In most Irish dialects, Dubh is correctly pronounced as duv or duf (usually pronounced duu in Ulster Irish). The original pronunciation is preserved in Old English as Difelin, Old Norse as Dyflin, modern Icelandic as Dyflinnand modern Manx as Divlyn. Historically, in the Gaelic script, bh was written with a dot over the b, rendering Duḃ Linn or Duḃlinn. Those without a knowledge of Irish omitted the dot, spelling the name as Dublin

Middle Ages

Dublin was established as a Viking settlement in the 9th century and, despite a number a rebellions by the native Irish, it remained largely under Viking control until the Norman invasion of Ireland was launched from Wales in 1169. The King of Leinster, Diarmait Mac Murchada, enlisted the help of Strongbow, the Earl of Pembroke, to conquer Dublin. Following Mac Murrough’s death, Strongbow declared himself King of Leinster after gaining control of the city. In response to Strongbow's successful invasion, King Henry II of England reaffirmed his sovereignty by mounting a larger invasion in 1171 and pronouncing himself Lord of Ireland.


Dublin Castle, which became the centre of English power in Ireland, was founded in 1204 as a major defensive work on the orders of King John of England. Following the appointment of the first Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1229, the city expanded and had a population of 8,000 by the end of the 13th century. Dublin prospered as a trade centre, despite an attempt by King Robert I of Scotland to capture the city in 1317. It remained a relatively small walled medieval town during the 14th century and was under constant threat from the surrounding native clans. In 1348, the Black Death, a lethal plague which had ravaged Europe, took hold in Dublin and killed thousands over the following decade.

Dublin was incorporated into the English Crown as The Pale, which was a narrow strip of English settlement along the eastern seaboard. The Tudor conquest of Ireland in the 16th century spelt a new era for Dublin, with the city enjoying a renewed prominence as the centre of administrative rule in Ireland. Determined to make Dublin a Protestant city, Queen Elizabeth I of England established Trinity College in 1592 as a solely Protestant university and ordered that the Catholic St. Patrick's and Christ Church cathedrals be converted to Protestant.

The city had a population of 21,000 in 1640 before a plague in 1649–51 wiped out almost half of the city's inhabitants. However, the city prospered again soon after as a result of the wool and linen trade with England, reaching a population of over 50,000 in 1700.

Early modern

As the city continued to prosper during the 17th century, Georgian Dublin became, for a short period, the second largest city of the British Empire and the fifth largest city in Europe, with the population exceeding 130,000. The vast majority of Dublin's most notable architecture dates from this period, such as the Four Courts and the Custom House. Temple Bar and Grafton Street are two of the few remaining areas that were not affected by the wave of Georgian reconstruction and maintained their medieval character.

Dublin grew even more dramatically during the 18th century, with the construction of many famous districts and buildings, such as Merrion Square, Parliament House and the Royal Exchange. The Wide Streets Commission was established in 1757 at the request of Dublin Corporation to govern architectural standards on the layout of streets, bridges and buildings. In 1759, the founding of the Guinness brewery resulted in a considerable economic gain for the city. For much of the time since its foundation, the brewery was Dublin's largest employer, but Catholics were confined to the lower echelons of employment at Guinness and only entered management level in the 1960s.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin

Sean Scully and Brice Marden

Sean Scully and Brice Marden
Should one see painting as an object or as the purely visual art? Formalism took that puzzle as the meaning of art—and as a directive for artists. Since the first Minimalist and Postmodern cracks in that fabulous two-dimensional façade, however, that directive has seemed dated. Abstraction, one used to hear, has died.

Remarkably, abstraction has survived by taking those cracks for its subject matter. Just as remarkably, two concurrent retrospectives follow artists who have pursued its implications all that time. Sean Scully calls his work "Walls of Light," but one could see neither the walls nor the light without the spaces between the stones. Even better and more influential in American art, Brice Marden has turned the cracks into calligraphy—and then covered them again and again in oil. In a postscript, I ask how their work has made me see gallery exhibitions by younger artists differently as well.
Sean Scully: 
Wall of Light Desert Night
(Museum of Modern Art, Forth Worth, 1999)


Walls of light


For over twenty years, Sean Scully has been building walls of light, and he attributes it all to an experience in Mexico. There he discovered the fall of sunlight on Mayan stone, and it has given his paintings ever since the character of patient observation and equally painstaking construction. He forms them of interlocking horizontal and vertical fields, each field consisting of bars perhaps a couple of feet long and half a foot thick. He may place two bars around a third of contrasting color, or he may submit them all to variations on light and dark. He typically works on the floor with a broad brush, which gives the bars the smooth, slightly rounded edges of worn stone. Even a pale blue or acid yellow can appear muted, as if reflected off dark matter.

A point of origins may sound suspect, but it tells a story, one of self-discovery. So does the return to an ancient civilization—or the theme of seeing the light. That theme just happens to unite any number of color fields beginning well before 1980, from Hudson River landscapes to Modernism's "make it new." Passage through a wall of light animates more than a few insipid TV dream sequences, but also James Turrell's illusion of solid air, Fred Sandback's rectangles of colored thread, or Bill Viola's operatic video. One could call it a productive myth. Scully insists that he applies the same methods year after year to the studio light in America and Europe.

Besides, the Irish-born artist has entered his sixties, and his education in London, at Harvard, and in New York had long inclined him to monochrome abstraction. Conversely, most of the paintings at the Met date from just the last few years. He names Henri Matisse and Mark Rothko as influences, and Rothko, too, came over the course of a year to his floating rectangles. The sober palette of red, black, and yellow also reminds me of Marsden Hartley. Dan Flavin and Ellsworth Kelly had their very different walls of light, each with an implicit opposition between art as object and visual record. One can see Scully as uniting wall and light—or, alternatively, as letting the two duke it out. His thin, layered, clearly visible brushwork, for example, could stand for the transparency of oil or the texture of stone.

Each term can itself pull in more than one direction, and in each case the ambiguity links Scully further to Henri Matisse or to late Modernism. A wall can mean flat surface or thick, shallow space. He hints at both when he leaves space between some bars, so that the ground shows through, while others overlap a bit. One can see either device as an architectural construction or a flattening out. Typically the ground appears lighter or brighter than the foreground image, and one can choose to identify that with flat canvas or light scattered off stone. Mayans perhaps, but certainly Aztecs and Incas developed cut-stone masonry from a simple post-and-lintel architecture to the plan for temples, terraced cities, and entire empires of the sun.

Light, similarly, can mean different things—either actual color or reflected light, something seen or something represented. Scully often adds the name of a color to a work's title, after Wall of Light. Just as often, it does not correspond to the predominant paint color. While suggestive, that also points to a limitation. The walls may look like concrete, but I could not myself notice much concrete difference between paintings produced in gritty New York, dreary London, sunny Barcelona, and the exurbs of Munich. One is likely to remember the exhibition's beauty and the synchrony of its ideas more than individual works, although I cannot chase one field of gray saturated in blue-green out of my head right now.

These walls of light work best on a grand scale, the scale of an actual wall, where the sensation of looking takes on weight. One can see paintings at a distance, as a barrier and as an extension of the artist's gesture. Jackson Pollock, of course, worked on the floor, too, and one can hardly help describing Scully's bars in human terms—as roughly the width of a hand or the length from elbow to finger tip. They also work surprisingly well in prints, a tribute to his concern for texture and technique. The paintings of intermediate scale look, wrongly, like sketches, although the Met's long, mezzanine with small rooms at either end handles scale well. Mostly, I clung to the succession of large works along the sky-lit central rooms, where something does love a wall.


The cover-up
Brice Marden covers his traces. Not that he hides them, not even a little. Up close, his stark early monochromes reveal so many signs of his knife, spatula, and brush that they appear scarred by paint itself. He then left a bottom strip bare, to show only the damage. In later work, since the mid-1980s, sinuous curves have the clarity and color of an enormous cartoon, and they weave over one another so that not a sign gets lost. For a time, at the very peak of geometric abstraction, he even allowed drips.

No, Marden simply covers every inch, again and again, until one can no longer look beyond the image or object to its history—much less to the artist's. Think of it as action painting without the action. In those dark works from the 1960s and 1970s, Marden would work oil and beeswax into one another, up to and over the very edge of the canvas. One can see the lip when two or three panels, each a single shade, abut each other.

The harshest of blues and greens look like shades of gray, and their glow seems to arise entirely from within. They serve as experiments in how much paint can absorb the light and how little it can give back.


Brice Marden: 
Cold Mountain 6 (Bridge)
(SF MOMA, 1989–1991)

He calls one early painting Three Deliberate Greys for Jasper Johns, and indeed Jasper Johns lingered over both gray and encaustic. However, Marden puts equal emphasis on the deliberate. For a short time like David Novros he introduces horizontal panels, like posts and lintel, and then at last comes the calligraphy. Maybe he saw that he never could efface his gestures, so as a literalist he may as well take them as composition and as subject matter. Well into the 1990s, glazes cover some of the curves, emphasizing the layering and translucency of oil, and Marden never, ever accepts bare canvas or linen. When, at first, drips extend the outline of a curve, they arise from the action of gravity on a picture leaning vertically against the wall as he worked, not from brushwork or chance.

Clearly what you see is what you get, with a rigor that makes other abstract art seem downright squeamish. Like Frank Stella, his compositions derive from the edge, but Stella's industrial colors and geometric logic approach conceptual art by comparison. Like Ellsworth Kelly, he uses shaped panels to embody the fall of light, but his shapes never depart from rectangles. Like Robert Ryman, he nurtures monochrome, but Ryman makes one attend to the bolts holding a work to the wall. For Marden, art functions as object only by virtue of his painting it. Like Scully, he sees a painted field as alternately mass and light, but never with the illusion of stone.

One could almost say that the curves set his art free. His early work influenced every abstract artist I knew, down to the messy tactility of some today, and it still dominates his space in museum collections, but I found it inapproachable. Now I could lose myself following Marden's paths as they nestle into an edge before weaving back into uncertain depths. One could mistake each one for a continuous brushstroke, except that their crossings have the contradictions and confinement of a Piranesi prison. However, they have none of the illusion of space in other artists who emulate Abstract Expressionism's shallow arena now, whether for white curves or still life. By the late 1990s, as their shapes smooth out and they increasingly seek the edge of canvas, they deny Pollock's gesture and symmetry more rigorously than ever.

Marden has said that his calligraphy derives from Franz Kline and Chinese art, but never from language. His retrospective keeps the labels far from the work—one last protection of image and object from writing. Postmodernists would throw a fit at the separation of art and text, and he never has lost his high-modern dream of covering his traces. However, the more obviously busy they get, the more they demand contemplation. The smooth curves run more and more to primaries, and his latest work may use a brightly colored ground as well. In the show's last room, two six-panel works go on view for the first time, and he may finally make me shut up and look.


A postscript: neo-formalism.
Thanks to Scully and Marden, abstraction had pride of place once again in New York museums, just when I should and do know better. For a second or two, I could hardly believe that art had ever left it for dead. Paintings in Chelsea have looked stranger and better for it, too, with Philip Taaffe and more coming up in the spring. If one has a fondness for hard edges or for pattern and decoration, call it a fringe benefit.

Like history, art never really repeats itself, except perhaps as farce—and why not? It helps even a formalist these days to look for elements of postmodern play. In the galleries this same fall, I had to see Pat Lipsky differently. Her rectangles have harder edges than Scully's, and she could well have squeezed the space from between the stones in his "Walls of Light." However, his close tones had me seeing the transparency in her varied blues, like cathedral glass. They also allowed me to see her staggered, vertical panes as taking rapid turns as image and ground.

In Postmodernism, of course, everything comes around twice, even repetition. Jackie Saccoccio likes walls, too. She interrupts her wall drawings with brightly colored paintings, so that one objects connect more readily to their environment. The trick made me nostalgic for the more expanded spaces of Matthew Ritchie a few weeks earlier—and, before that, among other more ambitious networks in the Whitney's "Remote Viewing."

Like Saccoccio's, Fiona Rae's canvases also looked perhaps a bit too pleasant and familiar. Up close, the whirl gives way to cartoon flowers, doggies, and whatever gobs of paint strike her fancy. Think of Sue Williams without the ability to emulate or parody Abstract Expressionism. Then try to imagine a British artist less determined to shock than an American one for a change.

Callum Innes, too, has a much-needed boost from New York's exposure to Marden. Innes, always good for a few big, sedate rectangles, grew restless long ago with his own visual finish. He has in fact used turpentine to wipe it away. The hills and valleys of streaky black also make me think of fire paintings by Makoto Fujimura. They share the latter's weakness, slightly bland images, but without his incredible technique and the pounding his surfaces take on the way to completion. On the other hand, I got a postmodern kick out of painting based on erasure.

As it happens, Fujimura is extending the technical wizardry and attention to surface textures, this time in gold leaf, and I could feel his own walls of light slowly building up and breaking down. Innes, too, gets better—in the back room, where he returns to his rectangles. As often in his work, the paintings here look clean and geometrical, until one notices the softer edges, brushed in or washed down by turpentine. Think of the strip at the bottom of an early Marden. However, Innes has recently left more of the canvas brightly colored and simply white, and those rectangles, too, can now read as both color fields and erasures. Ironically, Fujimura does better by settling for more, and Innes by pushing hard for less.

Sean Scully ran at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Brice Marden at The Museum of Modern Art, both through January 15, 2007. Pat Lipsky ran at Elizabeth Harris through November 11, Jackie Saccoccio at Black and White through December 30, Fiona Rae at Pace through December 2, and Callum Innes at Sean Kelly, though December 9. Makoto Fujimura Sara Tecchia through January 13, 2007. A disclaimer: my cat is named Scully, after the artist.




Source:

"Haber's Art Reviews: Sean Scully and Brice Marden." Haberarts.com in New.York: John Haber's Art Reviews. Web. 10 Oct. 2011. <http://www.haberarts.com/scully.htm>.

Some artwork.

















Videos


Sean Scully Reveals the Power of Abstract Art


Life and Work


Life and Work.


Scully was born in Dublin and raised in South London. He studied at Croydon College of Art and Newcastle University. He was a recipient of a graduate fellowship at Harvard in the early 1970s and subsequently settled in New York.


Scully was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1989 and 1993. He has exhibited widely in Europe and the United States, and is represented in the permanent collections of a number of museums and public galleries, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., The Art Institute of Chicago, the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, the National Gallery of Australia, the Tate Gallery, London, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, and many other private and public collections worldwide. In 2006 Scully donated eight of his paintings to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, which opened an extension that year with a room dedicated to Scully's works.






In 2005 to 2006, Scully's Wall of Light series was displayed at museums across the United States. The work originated in a trip Scully took to Mexico in 1983. He combines abstract works with figures.


“I hold to a very Romantic ideal of what's possible in art, and I hold to the idea of the 'personal universal.' This is a complex agenda. My project is complicated in this way, and in that sense I'm out of fashion. I'm going against the current trend towards bizarreness, oddness; as you just called it, the 'esoteric', which of course was around in the 1930s. That's what is being revisited now. In between the two great wars, there was a very strong period, particularly in Europe, of a strange, bizarre, distorted and perverse kind of figuration, with freaks in the paintings. Very disturbing twins, subjects like that. These paintings were mostly coming out of Italy and Germany. Now we have a return to that—again in a strange period, after the end of Modernism.”


Nowadays Scully lives and works in New York City, Barcelona, and Munich. He was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich.


Description of Work.


Scully's paintings are often made up of a number of panels and are abstract. Scully paints in oils, sometimes laying the paint on quite thickly to create textured surfaces. After a brief initial period of hard-edge painting Scully abandoned the masking tape while retaining his characteristic motif of the stripe which he has developed and refined over time. His paintings typically involve architectural constructions of abutting walls and panels of painted stripes. In recent years he has augmented his trademark stripes by also deploying a mode of compositional patterning more reminiscent of a checkerboard. He has stated that this style represents the way in which Ireland has moved towards a more chequered society. He stated in 2006, "I remember growing up in Ireland and everything being chequered, even the fields and the people."




Want to learn more about Sean Scully's life? Clique here.


Sean Scully (b. 1945), an internationally acclaimed artist with studios in New York City, Barcelona, Spain; and Munich, Germany; has been making prints for more than 30 years and considers these works to be as significant as his paintings. His prints, like his paintings, are richly layered and convey Scully's distinctive approach to abstraction based on relationships. "The Prints of Sean Scully" presents for the first time at the museum a selection of 57 works from a master set of prints that was acquired in 2001. Scully chose the Smithsonian American Art Museum as the only museum in the Unites States to receive a complete master set. The artist's prints range from large-scale, monumental compositions reminiscent of the paintings to smaller, more intimate expressions of the artist's ideas. Although certain themes recur in both his paintings and prints, Scully considers them independent and complementary. Joann Moser, senior curator for graphic arts, selected the prints and illustrated books featured in the exhibition.






Credit


"The Prints of Sean Scully" is organized and circulated by the Smithsonian American Art Museum with support from Gisele Galante Broida, Don Brown, Ruth Holmberg and Norfolk Southern Corporation. The exhibition’s tour is supported in part by the C.F. Foundation, Atlanta and the William R. Kenan Jr. Endowment Fund.


Publication


For a list of Sean Scully's publications click here. 




Midterm Assignment.

My research project focuses on Sean Scully an Irish-born American painter and printmaker who have twice been named a Turner Prize nominee. Scully was born in Dublin and raised in South London. He Studied at Croydon College of Art and Newcastle University. In 1972 Scully was awarded a Knox Fellowship to study art at Harvard University, and in 1975, based on the merit of his early paintings, Sully won a Harkness Fellowship, which allowed him to move permanently to New York. Scully’s art is composed of geometric shapes, primarily rectangles, arranged on horizontal and vertical axes evoking architectural forms. In its harmony and spirituality, his paintings recall the traditions of early European modernism, particularly the work of Henri Matisse and Piet Mondrian, and in mood and open-ended composition, Pollock’s and Rothko’s versions of abstract expressionism. Scully’s work reconciles European order with American vigor, or more specifically, how to combine Mondrian's clarity with Matisse's sensuousness, Pollock's rhythm, and Rothko's fluidity, a question to which he gives slightly different answers with each completed work.

Scully was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1989 and 1993. He has exhibited widely in Europe and the United States, and is represented in the permanent collections of a number of museums and public galleries, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., The Art Institute of Chicago, the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, the National Gallery of Australia, the Tate Gallery, London, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, and many other private and public collections worldwide. In 2006 Scully donated eight of his paintings to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, which opened an extension that year with a room dedicated to Scully's works.

Scully is well known because of his paintings are often make up with a number of panels and are abstract. He paints in oil, sometimes laying the paint on quite thickly to create textured surfaces. His paintings typically involve architectural constructions of abutting walls and panels of painted stripes. In recent years he has augmented his trademark stripes by also deploying a mode of compositional patterning more reminiscent of a checkerboard. He has stated that this style represents the way in which Ireland has moved towards a more chequered society. He stated in 2006, "I remember growing up in Ireland and everything being chequered, even the fields and the people."

When it comes to analyzing Sean Scully work people most look deep and consider his background, since his work contain a lot of cultural and traditional content. Scully’s work derived from traditions of European early modernism, (Mondrian and Matisse), in it’s ideals for harmony and spirituality; and American late modernism (Pollock and Rothko), in its urge for large, open-ended compositions, expressing personal inner states.

On this research I will try to focus on the main points, life and work of Sean Scully, as well do some research about the cities that the lived, and all the kind of works done by him. It will be a very interesting project to execute and conclude this assignment, since I am an art major student, it will be interesting to learn more about art in general, and all the types of art work such as printmaking, photography, graphic design, paint, etc; in order to get a knowledge of the art field. I think Sean Scully is a nice and good reference source for me to do this project because even though he was born on a foreign country, he was able to study in the US and be well know for what he does. I am a foreign student as well and that will be very inspiring for me to read and know more about his journey to get where he is today.





SOURCES:
"Sean Scully - Bio." The Phillips Collection. Web. 10 Oct. 2011. <http://www.phillipscollection.org/research/american_art/bios/scully-bio.htm>.

External Links

Sean Scully website.
http://www.sean-scully.com/en/home/

Sean Scully: Works Exhibitions.
David Winton Bell Gallery http://www.brown.edu/Facilities/David_Winton_Bell_Gallery/scully.html