The Brooklyn Rail

In one of Picasso’s pithy phrases, the artist remarked “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” This quote stuck with me as I took in the exhibition Sean Scully: Jack the Wolf, which presents the drawings Scully made for a forthcoming children’s book in collaboration with his son Oisin, who was, at the time, five years old. In this case, I was thinking of Picasso’s formulation in the reverse. I was not concerned with Oisin’s future, but rather, it seemed to me that by dipping back into the less hidebound realm of childhood creativity, the elder Scully—the consummate established, successful artist—had tapped into a new, surprising mode of production that was touching and intergenerational, but also effulgently coursing back into his own independent production.

To take a step back: the show presents forty drawings in some combination of crayon, watercolor, ink, pencil, and marker on paper, all illustrations to an original children’s story, Jack the Wolf. The project originated in 2014, when Sean Scully began improvising a children’s story to Oisin. The narrative and images are charming, surprising, humorous, affecting, and profound at the same time. In some, the wolf is seen reclining, reading a copy of HOWL magazine. He ventures out in the world and befriends a rabbit named Rebecca. He also explores many of the houses in town, and takes to plundering stores of chocolate from his human neighbors.

These drawings vary in style. Some are on the crude (or naive) end of the spectrum, while others are more elaborate and refined. All of them, however, share the same punch and direction. One thinks of the knowledge of craft and technique passed down through generations (and perhaps other artist-offspring duos like Giovanni Santi and Raphael, Fra Filippo and Filippino Lippi, Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, Camille and Lucien Pissarro), but this is almost beside the point. Oisin, today a teenager, can do whatever he wants with his future (sorry, Picasso). Instead it is Sean who emerges as the fulcrum, and central enigma, of this enterprise. With his recognizable brand of “emotional abstraction,” Scully has cemented himself since the 1970s as one of the leading painters of our time, his bands of colorful, geometric stripes his indelible signature.

Scully has taken up figurative painting in recent years, also in part as a result of his deep conversations with his son. In fact, much of his pictorial production is tied to his relationship with Oisin. In an interview with David Carrier, the artist reflects: “…children will change your life in ways you cannot imagine. My son has undone my conceit. When you become a willing devoted servant, a few other things change as well. And you don’t need to worry about over-intellectualizing it. I wanted to paint my son. I was taking photos. But photos are not paintings. Paintings embody an image in a monumental surface, in colors that can only be invented.”

Elements of Scully’s abstractions do creep, here and there, into the drawings for Jack the Wolf. We see this, for example, in the color geometries of the houses that Jack visits and the planar fields of quietly vibrating accretions of layered transparent washes. The works are framed in bright hues, quadrilaterals that themselves could be works of minimalist abstraction, and are arrayed in either single-row installations or as batches of drawings grouped together in off-kilter formations. Notably, the exhibition also presented three of the elder Scully’s oil paintings, executed on linen, copper, and aluminum, respectively. He often paints his figurative and abstract works side by side (“I jump,” he said, when asked how he can do both simultaneously), and the effect of seeing both bodies of work in the same place affirms the indefatigable artist still flush with ideas decades into his career. It also says volumes about the fact that one body of work is not to be taken any less seriously than the other.

There is also a large sculpture on view, Felt Stack I (2020), an almost six-foot structure made of aluminum squares wrapped in colorful felt. Scully’s sculptures are less widely known than his pictorial production, but he has often discussed them as three-dimensional embodiments of his painting, just as his figurative paintings began as two-dimensional representations of his son. There is a porousness to these categories that Scully navigates effortlessly, in ways that may be surprising to viewers who only know him through his most familiar pictorial vocabulary—a synecdoche for Scully’s whole life and art, deep and intertwined. Perhaps unavoidable for a show centered around an original children’s book, the exhibition also contains much humor, a feature of Scully’s art and personality which often goes unnoticed. Though the sculpture may evoke minimalist works by Donald Judd, Carl Andre, or Robert Morris, it also conjures another children’s tale: The Princess and the Pea…