Studio altercations

I recently visited an exhibition of paintings by the Irish born painter and two time Turner prize nominee Sean Scully. Speaking of his work Scully says "I hold to a very Romantic ideal of what's possible in art, and I hold to the idea of the 'personal universal.' This is a complex agenda. My project is complicated in this way, and in that sense I'm out of fashion. I'm going against the current trend towards bizarreness, oddness; as you just called it, the 'esoteric', which of course was around in the 1920's. That's what is being revisited now. In between the two great wars, there was a very strong period, particularly in Europe, of a strange, bizarre, distorted and perverse kind of figuration, with freaks in the paintings. Very disturbing twins, subjects like that. These paintings were mostly coming out of Italy and Germany. Now we have a return to that again in a strange period, after the end of Modernism".

So there I was in the vast room that is the top floor of the newly refurbished Ulster Museum with my seven year old daughter. She loves art and doesn’t care too much for dinosaur bones, coins in glass cases, pressy-button interactive maps and giant stuffed dogs. A bit like me, the three floors of stuff en-route to the gallery felt more like an obligation, it was the gallery that we wanted to get to. To be honest I have never really been a fan of Scully’s paintings, not in a “I don’t know art but I know what I like” kind of way. It’s more the fact that I have never felt able to fully engage with his work in the same way that I can sit mesmerised for hours in the Rothko room at the Tate Modern in London. Or the way that Caulfield is always able to catch my eye or how Bacon has the uncanny ability to grab me by the throat, pin me up against the wall and then tickle me under the chin with a feather pretending to be my friend. Scully has never done this for me, it’s not like I cant appreciate his paintings, I just don’t want to spend too much time with them. I find them a bit like an old acquaintance who thinks that they are my friend, and although there is nothing necessarily wrong with them you just don’t like being in their company.

My daughter on the other hand was spending time with each painting, observing the ‘different brush strokes’ and ‘interesting use of colour’. On finishing with one painting, grabbing my metaphorical coat tail, she would move us on to the next one. I played along. She then leads me into a small side room, which is showing extracts from the three short documentary films, Sean Scully at work by Robert Gardner. She nestles into my arm, we sit, we watch and I begin to understand. In the film Scully sitting in his Barcelona apartment talks about his paintings. Looking the camera in the eye he simply describes that painting is his joy, how he feels so grateful that he is able to paint because after all he could be dead. For years I had been viewing Scully’s work simply as paintings, working out of the modernist tradition, dealing with shapes, form, composition and texture. I had been viewing them as something to personally experience rather than someone else’s deeply personal experience.

There are a few moments during the film where Scully is filmed standing in front of a huge blank canvas. Paint pot in hand, brush in other he just stands gently swaying from side to side considering his first move. He moves towards the canvas, lifts his brush, goes to make a mark, but then in a moment of last minute hesitancy holds back. Not the right time. Like a boxer at the beginning of a bout he eyeball’s the canvas, waiting for the moment when the guard is dropped, punch thrown and fight beginnings. Two things struck me as I watched this studio altercation. For Scully these are deeply personal paintings, a moment of thought, the artist dropping his guard to put a little bit of himself on canvas. Secondly, he always makes a move, the canvas is never left blank. Sure there is footage of him repainting, scraping and scratching but after the jostling and almost-but-not-quites the paint hits the canvas.

So there I was, daughter nestled in arm, making a friend out of an old acquaintance, listening to the clink of the penny dropping when my thoughts turned to other things. There is lots of discussion in the church at the moment about how we ‘do’ church, much of which is good and thought provoking stuff and then some which is maybe not so helpful. But in asking these questions unlike Scully we are not working with a blank canvas, but a painting that has been painted and repainted for thousands of years. It’s a complex painting, the canvas thick and heavy with paint, primary colours that stand boldly alongside a Mondrian, and hues that bleed into others where colours mix, making different shades. It is, I believe, in essence a beautiful painting with lots of imperfect blemishes, lots of scars, colours that jar and perspectives that clash. It is also a painting that I believe needs, in part, some serious restoration and repainting.  Restoring an old painting takes time, skill and a lot of patience. Repainting takes great courage, knowing which bits need touched up and others that need wholesale change. Like Scully we can stand in front of the canvas paint and brush in hand discussing and debating what our move is going to be, the proposition we are going to make. But there comes a time where we have to stop, move towards the canvas lift the brush heavy with paint and make our mark. Church is not first and foremost a theoretical exercise but something that we do, it is as Leslie Newbigin said the hermeneutic of the gospel. to be continued…..

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