so I’ve been reading Sean Scully’s collected writings. I like it .. he and his writing are inspirational and interesting to me. Actually, he says what i wanted to say but could never quite formulate in a lot if not most instances throughout his career.
I am devising an essay in response to his essay on Rothko titled Bodies of Light.
I am titling my new watercolor series and oil paintings, “Bodies of Light” 1999 after that brilliant essay. Maybe I’ll make it through a decade with that like he did with Wall of Light. hehe…
Scully’s conclusions on the historical path from Van Gogh to Mondrian to Rothko to his own long engagement with those artists through his practice is very concise and makes sense.
He opens the essay with, “closing the book” on Rothko, linking that phrase to a larger writing, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition by Robert Rosenblum. Scully speaks of the “brilliantly elemental and symbolically religious” (spiritual, philosophical) in a single stroke” breakthrough that Rothko made. He ties it in with Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea (1809) (front cover) and to Rothko’s Green and Blue (1959) (back cover literally closing Rosenblum’s book.
In 2005 Donald Kuspit wrote a review of Scully’s Wall of Light exhibit at the Met in New York titled Sacred Sadness (Artnet, October 2006). In that essay one can find the perfect explanation of both Scully’s lifelong pursuit and mine. So much in both the Bodies of Light essay and the Sacred Sadness review echo my own sentiments and ideas that have floated through the years of my painting practice—the painter’s path. They elucidate and catalog my own hard won understanding of the “human endeavor” of painting in both the “modern tradition of abstraction” and the Baudelraire-ian concept of “Romanticism” —”intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite”.
Untitled Number 11, Bodies of Light, Oil and Beeswax on Belgian Linen, 30” x 66”. Three canvases 30”x 22” each. ©2021 , Steven Plount