“The whole point of painting is that it has the potential to be so humanistic, so expressive…I want my brushstrokes to be full of feeling – material feeing manifested in form and color.”
An ebullient configuration of striped forms, Song is an exceptional painting from Sean Scully’s early oeuvre of multi-panel works. Exemplifying the inimitable pictorial dialect of glossily painted horizontal and vertical bars that have become the artist’s hallmark, the present piece reveals not only the possibility of color in non-figurative form but also the artist’s spirited artistic philosophy. Executed in 1986, the present piece brilliantly exhibits Scully’s magisterial distillation of palette, light, and movement to their most basic forms to exude boundless melodic energy.
Pulsating with the ethereal dynamism of shimmering color and light, Song embodies Sean Scully’s assertion that, “the whole point of painting is that it has the potential to be so humanistic, so expressive…I want my brushstrokes to be full of feeling – material feeing manifested in form and color.” (The artist quoted in Exh. Cat, Sean Scully: The Art of the Stripe, Hood Museum of Art Dartmouth College, Hanover 2008, p. 66). Lustrously pigmented by alternating stripes, the present work exquisitely juxtaposes two distinct panels. Through subtle bleeds of color and tactile brushstrokes, each stratified band of color marvelously bears the mark of its creator and suggests rhythmic movement within the picture plane. Upon the rightmost panel, stripes of varying widths alternate between carmine overlays and cascades of golden pigment awash with brushstrokes of the same deep red. Such verticals are contrasted by the left panel’s horizontals, wherein lush blue is both stacked between and blended into bright yellow impastos. Marking the first appearance of such compositional experimentation in the artist’s oeuvre, two squares in the left uppermost corner, one of glossed black and one of white paint swathed over a terra cotta hue, subvert the rigorous geometry of Song. With this infusion of neutrality, Scully asserts a tension that underscores the vitality of the sumptuously hued stripes. Protruding outward, the right panel ruptures the two-dimensionality of the painted canvas and endows the composition with a sculptural presence that is superbly heightened by the textural swathes of paint which themselves suggest volume and dimensionality. As such, Song powerfully imbues the ambiance of its surroundings with the lyricism evoked in the painting’s title.
The present work testifies to Scully’s masterful synthesis of the formal traditions of European masters with a distinctly American abstract tradition. His chromatic expression of color is bound to the post-Impressionist works of Pierre Bonnard and Paul Gauguin, whose preoccupation with ideas of opacity and translucency offer a poignant parallel to Scully’s own visual orchestration, while his abstract vernacular echoes the brooding tones and ethereal understanding of light perfected by Caravaggio and Velazquez. Scully’s fascination with black, as manifested in Song, stems from the artist’s admiration of the rich black tones in the paintings of seventeenth-century Spanish artists such as Goya. While the present work incorporates the polished minimalism of Donald Judd and Frank Stella that reigned throughout his early years as a painter, it makes especially present Scully’s affinity with Mark Rothko’s impassioned approach to color and rendering of the dramatic sublime.
"You can do certain things with painting... you cannot do with anything else. With a painting, you can contain within borders a lot of experience, narrative, emotion, poetry, idea, thought, t.mes , references and so on... Painting has a unique potential to stop t.mes and compact feelings and experience."
Paralleling Rothko’s canvases, Song evidences the evolution of Scully’s distinct abstract language of rectangular brick-like forms that fit closely together characterized by a tangible weaving of pigment to reveal the layers beneath the surface of the canvas. Scully analogously pares down his means to pure color and surface texture, to tease out feeling and contemplation from the depths of tone, gesture, and light manifested in feathered brushstrokes. As evidenced by the harmonious present work, Scully’s paintings are often connected by their titles to specific experiences, individuals and places. The artist affirms, "You can do certain things with painting that are unique to painting that you cannot do with anything else. With a painting you can contain within borders a lot of experience, narrative, emotion, poetry, idea, thought, t.mes , references and so on, all within a frame...Painting has a unique potential to stop t.mes and compact feelings and experience." (Sean Scully quoted in: Sean Scully: Body of Light, National Gallery of Australia) Enrapturing viewers through its captivating resplendency, Song endures as an exceptional example of Sean Scully’s ongoing investigation of striped forms. The present work is an embrace of the gestural capacities of color and lyrical attributes of paint in order to stunningly emanate light and depth. A monumental affirmation of the artist's spirited outlook towards life,Song fortifies Scully’s status among the foremost abstract painters of his t.mes .
