Sean Scully

Juda Rowan Gallery, London

Maurice Poirier, Sean Scully, New York, 1990, plate 78.

Catalogue colour comparison: The colours are stronger than the illustration suggests, notably the yellow pigments which are brighter. The surface is also more textured than the illustration suggests. Structure: Original canvas in excellent overall condition with strong passages of impasto throughout. Ultraviolet light analysis: There appear to be no signs of retouching. Frame: Held in a plaster gilt box frame under glass; unexamined out of frame.
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'My pictures have individual personalities and that's why I sometimes give them the names of people or places. They anchor themselves to things outside of mere art. I'm not making mere paintings. I want them to be more than that. I want them to be humanistically expressive. So it's very important to me that they have titles'. (Scully, quoted in David Carrier, Sean Scully, London, 2004, p. 107)

Westray refers to one of Orkney's north isles off the coast of Northern Scotland and relates to Scully's ongoing practice of naming works after specific locations. In 1982, for example, he spent the summer working in Montauk, Long Island at Edward Albee's artists's colony and his smaller works from that period were all named after nearby islands such as Shelter Island, Block and Fire, works which David Carrier has noted 'look like islands surrounded by the ocean' (Carrier, op.cit., p.112). Similarly, the isolated red and black form of Westray is certainly suggestive of an island form, surrounded by the cooler tones which evoke the luminiscent quality of light and water experienced on the island, the Queen o' the Isles.   

In contrast to the dark monochrome tones and minimalist handling of his work from the mid to late 1970s such as Fort 3 (1979) and Painting for One Place (1979, destroyed), the rich bands of colour in the present work where each brushstroke is clearly visible, demonstrate the artist's development at the beginning of the 1980s of a more vibrant and dynamic abstraction. The bright adjacent bands of colour are enlivened by a complex system of over-painting that gives to each bar a compelling tonal and chromatic intensity that is at odds with the highly structured, grid like composition.  

The year of the present work, 1984, was a particuarly significant one for the artist as he was awarded an Artist's Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and he was also included in the Museum of Modern Art, New York's seminal exhibition An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture. Amidst the vogue for Neo-Expressionist painting at the time, his inclusion in the show reinforced his position as one of the leading abstract artists of his generation.