The Brooklyn Rail

Dangling from a quince tree at Sean Scully’s studio, a bald-faced hornets’ nest buzzes like a chainsaw. We’ve stepped through the back door into the garden for an impromptu pruning of things that the artist has planted in Tappan, New York over the past decade. When I say garden, imagine an expanse of ground the length of a soccer field, between a high concrete wall and a protective, spiked metal fence. The plot burgeons with fruit trees, container tomatoes, and climbing roses that Scully takes great pleasure in tending, even if the pruning is made infrequent by his prodigious work and travel commitments, and family life.

Land restoration began in 2013, when Scully and his wife, the painter Liliane Tomasko, acquired the property—a decommissioned broadcasting station insulated by boggy woods and utility lines. They cleared all manner of debris—oil drums, car parts and pavement chunks disposed over the years—and planted saplings. The resulting effort is a provisionally tamed landscape with cut-through views of chosen stumps under a canopy of sky. It is as if “Capability” Brown came over to place the choicest specimens— cryptomerias, tupelos, and sculptures of stacked iron, steel, and wood. An unpainted Japanese footbridge over a croaking pond pays homage to Monet’s garden at Giverny.

This garden is a project of divine reclamation, a practice that runs through Sean Scully’s life and work, from the construction in 1978 of his studio at 110 Duane Street in New York, to the paintings he made on Long Island during a transformative residency in the summer of 1982. That August, Scully received a fellowship to spend a month at the Edward F. Albee Foundation, on the playwright’s compound in Montauk. Established in 1967 by Albee with proceeds from his play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the foundation has provided residencies for visual artists and writers at the William Flanagan Memorial Creative Persons Center, familiarly known as “the Barn.” I asked Sean how his invitation came to be, and he responded: “There were no letters, no adjudicators, no requirements. It was just because Albee liked your work.”

This summer, at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York, Sean Scully: The Albee Barn, Montauk  surveys the artist’s work from 1981 to 2024, exploring his Long Island connection, and the transformative impact it made on his subsequent work. Organized by Mónica Ramírez-Montagut, Ph.D., Executive Director, with Kaitlin Halloran, Associate Curator and Publications Manager, the exhibition reunites fifteen paintings made during his month-long residency, then carries us forward with pivotal works of succeeding decades that, even in their monumental scale, contain the genetic material of these diminutive works. What follows is a reflection on Scully's oeuvre in relation to other Long Island-based paintings—touchstones for the perennial reinvention of an American landscape tradition.

Forty-three years ago this August, Scully and the painter Catherine Lee drove out east and set up in the Barn, on a secluded knoll near the Atlantic Ocean. The painters Eric Erickson and Michael David were there too, and they shared rides to and from the city, where Scully continued to work. I’ve been studying the Barn paintings for two years now, and thinking about Scully’s incubation on islands, especially Long Island, with its deep bench of resident artists over the last two centuries. Before Montauk—from 1975 when he moved to New York City from London—Scully had worked for seven years to forge a life in “the coliseum,” the gladiatorial grid of New York City, with its compression, economic and health crises, and merciless competition.

In the haven of the Duane Street studio (thoroughly documented by Deborah Solomon in the Parrish Museum’s exhibition catalogue), Scully established a sanctum of private life and rigorous practice, developing his own language of geometric abstraction, inscribed with a quickening force. The studio, repurposed from a former textile factory, was configured from reclaimed wood storage shelves. Disassembling these, Scully framed out his space. He recalls how, before installing the sheetrock walls, the framing became a three-dimensional drawing. Enclosing the histories of labor, immigration, and textile manufacturing of New York City, it was his oasis within the island of Manhattan.

In Montauk, the studio held a bucolic past. Rather than bolts of silk and cotton, the Barn housed horses, built in 1926 as stables for Montauk Manor. Originally, an Algonquian nation (variously called Metoac or Montaukett) inhabited all of Long Island, east of the present-day Queens County line. Montauk’s peninsula is marked by bluffs overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, and fluted clay pinnacles called hoodoos. Boulders deposited by a melting glacier sixteen thousand years ago punctuate the beaches. These strata of material and time would remain in Scully’s mind, just as the ancient dry stone wall formations of Ireland’s Aran Islands would later inspire a series of photographs in 2005.

He collected discarded wood boards around the Barn, the flotsam and jetsam of previous fellows. You can imagine the scuzzy patina of matter in decomposition. He painted their surfaces, then abutted or layered them at right angles (think of Paul Cézanne’s stacked madeleines) and bolted them together. Stripes, tenderly applied in varying widths and textures, became a conduit of climate, place, and time. Paint alchemically sealed the underlying material which would have, in time, turned to dust. Wood straps on the backs of the paintings reveal the painter’s modes of attachment, an urgency of construction that propelled what he knew to be a limited amount of time.

On Long Island, Scully regained an intimacy with nature. Part of the daily routine was riding his bike from the Barn to the beach, something new for him. He watched greens turn to blacks in seaweed strands drying in the sun. Here was the marine environment that gave Jackson Pollock his own liberation from the city’s compression—even his material bounty for Sea Change (1947) painted two years after he and Lee Krasner had moved to Fireplace Road in Springs, just west of Montauk.

Scully’s paintings became little rafts carrying instructions for the pictures of the following decades. He named them after the islands of Long Island Sound and some further afield. He bolted these to Ireland, Great Britain, and New York City, his existing inventory of island histories.

By 1982 Scully had moved away from the restrictive tenets of Minimalism that he had ingested and personalized, utilizing razor-sharp grids above fields of glowing color that emitted a diodic light. These were achieved with masking tape and a trained hand that suppressed any evidence of a brush in it. While Scully’s use of stripes as time signatures for rhythm continued, Long Island prompted a loosening of the strict titration of previous work to give some leeway to the weight of emotion. Now, staves and regiments of colored stripes laid down with less restricted strokes scooted across the wood and dried to form crusts and slicks that glistened, or absorbed the light in a thousand different ways.

The lineages of American painting that inform the Montauk works can be felt in Scully’s relationship to other artists for whom Long Island was a refuge or residence. Luminism, for example, a stylistic movement of the late nineteenth century, reflected the writings of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson—to immerse oneself in nature as a portal to access the divine. In 1954, art historian John I. H. Baur coined the term to describe the particularly American consciousness of atmosphere and light in landscape paintings of the period. Luminist painter Martin Johnson Heade made scientifically accurate paintings of orchids, hummingbirds, and Long Island waterways, achieving a crystalline facture through light-conducting glazes of oil color.

Heade’s Sunset on Long Beach (ca. 1867) lays down the wetlands of southern Long Island, bathed in simmering pinks beneath a procession of thin stratus clouds. Sean Scully’s comments about Ridge (1982), a 15 by 16-inch painting, reminds me of Heade’s chronology of a day. “I painted the red and orange in the late afternoon in Edward Albee’s Barn, with the sinking sun beating down on the back of my neck. The following morning, when it was cool, I painted the vertical blue and cream, which crossed, and corrected the heat of the previous day.”

John Frederick Kensett’s Eaton’s Neck, Long Island (1872) interlocks sky, dunes and shoreline in silver and gray greens, chalk white and burnt umbers. Painted in the last summer of Kensett’s life, it is tinged with finality. Sean Scully’s two-panel Bear (1982) similarly mediates the atmospheres of midnight and storms at sea, stacking coal blacks, smudged whites, and metallic grays. It might have been a perfect square, but the right panel is thinner, extending beyond the left by about an inch. The jogged alignment and unequal widths of stripes on the conjoined panels creates an optical bounce, as in old films with deteriorating sprockets.

This suite of colors (though varied) appears thirty-one years later in Scully’s “Landline” series, begun in 2013. While the term “landline” refers to liminal spaces (the transitions between the land, sea, and sky) there is also an undercurrent of nostalgia (remember stationary phone calls?). The turbulent Landline, Baltic (2018), evokes Mark Rothko’s suffusive paintings, such as his 1968 untitled work, that were made from 1949 to the end of his life, when he spent significant time at his home in East Hampton.

The three painted planks of Elder (1982) are conjoined with complementary, vertical stripes of kumquat and royal blue, against wider, horizontal bands of chocolate-maroon and yellow. Along the bottom edge of the painting, a sliver of maroon slinks under the middle panel. All this shape-slithering and shoehorning reminds me of Lee Krasner’s monumental Number 2, from 1951. Painted in Springs, its planes of putty pinks, dusky whites, oranges and celadon seem to have been mixed with dust or soot. To realize colors with such fine nuance, painters often reserve leftovers. In Scully’s studio, buckets of mineral spirits and pigment slurries from rinsed brushes are saved. His complex color variations are achieved by occasionally adding small amounts of this gray slurry to the mixture. An incalculable number of colors emerge, never to be replicated, from that which is never wasted. Embedded within their murky richness is the condition of time, in the crushed particles of earth.

Portals have been a recurring subject in Scully’s work, with their implication of invitation and transition. Plum (1982) has a diminutive door, framed by piccalilli yellow and ochre stripes, promising entry into privacy and security, although smaller than the one at the Tappan studio. Willem de Kooning’s Door to the River (1960) was made when he began dividing his time between New York and East Hampton. Of his paintings during this period, he remarked: “They’re emotions, most of them … landscapes and highways and sensations of … the feeling of going to the city or coming from it.” I think of Sean Scully driving the Montauk Highway, inhaling the salt sea air.

The impulse to reclaim ourselves is grounded in the instinct to survive whatever hardships life brings to our door. This has always been a driving force for Sean Scully. As a child, leaving Ireland and surviving poverty in South London, he jumped fences into other people’s gardens to escape. From the paintings he made on Long Island almost fifty years ago to the present, he carries this forward fearlessly, even making an oasis that accommodates hornets.