Language of Light

The Language of Light is an authorised selection from Sean Scully’s lectures, notebooks and interviews, over the course of forty years, and provides an intimate overview of his work as painter, printmaker, sculptor and photographer. Scully’s reflections on his art are sustained throughout by his insights into the work of other artists, past and present: from Chardin to Morandi, from Rothko to Van Gogh, from Mondrian to Paul Klee or Gerhard Richter. The volume is equally an autobiographical sequence, reflecting on the artist’s Irish origins and early childhood, his years of wandering and achievement – from Newcastle to New York – and his moment-by-moment responses to the world around him. As Paul Keegan writes in his introduction, ‘this book about painting is about many other things too, which gives its proceedings an outdoors atmosphere, an air of looking around’. The texts are often brief and invariably candid. They reveal a writer who paints, as much as a painter who writes. The book is organised into sections: Life Studies, Stories, Americana, Places, Portraits. The Language of Light contains forty or so images from Scully’s own work, representing his geometric abstractions and stripe motifs, his sculpture and photography, as well as a selection of supporting images from the work of other artists. The edition has benefited from the assistance of the Scully Archive, and has the approval of the artist.