Art heroes: Sean Scully

Looking at Sean Scully's paintings of stripes and rectangles, I've thought "that would make a good quilt" (after all, look how Nancy Crow uses stripes!). Coming across his work on paper has made me want to know more about this artist.
He was born in Dublin in 1945, grew up and studied art in Britain but moved to America in 1975 and seems to have studios all over the place. He started painting in the days of Op Art, and cites Mondrian, Rothko and Matisse as prime influences. Scully left school at 15 and started his art career by going to night classes at Central School of Art; studying Van Gogh's "Chair" at the Tate was a turning point. I'm fascinated that his hard-working mother later became a professional singer and, along with his father, a champion tango dancer - they moved to Spain. Here they are in a still from Robert Gardner's 1998 video, Scully in Malaga:
His paintings are inspired by the architectural structures of our built environment; his work has been called a synthesis of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. Each area has a "single attribute" of lightness or darkness. The painterliness softens the geometry, and the geometry contains the painterliness.

This site has audio clips of the artist discussing 33 individual works. And the pdf of the show guide includes a brief history of the stripe in western society!

The origin of his stripe motif was a trip to Morocco in 1969, where he saw striped djellabas everywhere, and strips of wool set out for making carpets. Then he saw striped tents on the beach: "I thought it was the most beautiful thing I'd seen in my life" he said. (We should, of course, examine our own lives for such moments, and use them in our own art.)

After he came back from Morocco he started to make his work "very patterned". (Often pattern=decoration, so how does this get to be art? Because it's paint? Because he went to art school? Because art critics have written seriously about it?)

Later he "stripped out anything decorative", leaving the tension between the stripes and blocks, and the buildup of colour. Instead of calling the abstract paintings Untitled he gives them titles that evoke images. "Every surface is redolent of some other painted surface in the real world" said a review of his show in London earlier this year.

You can see lots of the paintings here. On screen, everything looks the same size - to give you a sense of scale, here's Scully with some of the paintings -He also takes photographs, especially of old doors, taking portraits of their history; often they disappear, replaced by an anonymous door. Also, "a door is a place before another place".