Sean Scully

What makes a person an artist? How do works of art and their very own, extraordinary style come into being? And how does the prominent painter view his own work? The world-famous painter Sean Scully met with the philosopher David Carrier for several in-depth interview sessions. Their conversations explore these and many more questions about Scully’s life, work, and ideas. The result is a rich manuscript that very closely approaches the status of autobiography. Scully provides personal insights into his life and the important sources of inspiration for his career. He discusses his own view of his entire oeuvre, of art history and his position within it. Thus, this text becomes a literal eye-opener for Scully’s art, which can be (re)discovered through his words.

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.

Sean Scully is a world-renowned abstract painter and one of the leading artists of his generation, whose work is held in major museum collections around the world. In Jack the Wolf, he teamed up with his son Oisin to create a children's fairytale: Sean created the paintings and Oisin created the story. Jack the Wolf lives in a beautiful cave on a short mountain, near Colorfull Town. Jack is a happy and benevolent wolf, with only one weakness: CHOCOLATE. Follow Jack the Wolf through the pages of this beautifully illustrated book by world-renowned artist Sean Scully and his son Oisin Scully, to discover the trouble Jack causes to the children of Colorfull Town in his nightly hunts for chocolate dinners, and how his new friend Rebecca the Rabbit helps him restore happiness to the sad children of the town. The publication of Jack the Wolf coincides with the opening of an exhibition at the Cheim Read Gallery in New York City in September 2023 that will feature the original drawings in the book as well as Sean Scully's abstract paintings and sculpture that link visually to the Jack the Wolf world. The remarkable combination of drawings, sculpture, and paintings will draw national press. Callaway plans advertising and interviews with Sean Scully nationally for the book's publication. Jack the Wolf is the first title in the new Callaway children's book series focusing on artists creating art with a family member.

A stunning showcase of the iconic Irish-born painter's soft geometric abstractionsThis exhibition catalog features large-scale paintings from Sean Scully's (born 1945) most formative series, alongside a selection of watercolors and a monumental sculpture. His work is characterized by the fusion of European painting traditions with the distinct language of American abstraction.

A rumination on authority and its limitations, about what we think we know - and the spaces in between. In Confessions of Narcissus, Scully suggests that our demand for narrative coherence is one of the things that makes our lives so difficult to bear, that when William Hazlitt declared, "It is we who are Hamlet", he was telling us something about Shakespeare’s universality that is worth considering: Hamlet does not just give voice to our own fears and anxieties, he also calls them into being. In the process of trying to find cures for ourselves, that is to say, we become creators, to some extent, of our own misfortunes. Confessions of Narcissus builds from the idea that stories are what we require and also (partly) what we suffer from. In this series of observations and aphorisms about literature and life, Scully makes the case that uncertainty isn't an ailment that we should necessarily try to overcome. Following in the tradition of Keats and others, uncertainty may be something that we have good cause to be more curious about, that uncertainty has artistic merit and is a state of being that we might even come to enjoy.