Monday, October 10, 2011

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>.

No comments:

Post a Comment