What makes a person an artist? How do works of art and their very own, extraordinary style come into being? And how does the prominent painter view his own work? The world-famous painter Sean Scully met with the philosopher David Carrier for several in-depth interview sessions. Their conversations explore these and many more questions about Scully’s life, work, and ideas. The result is a rich manuscript that very closely approaches the status of autobiography. Scully provides personal insights into his life and the important sources of inspiration for his career. He discusses his own view of his entire oeuvre, of art history and his position within it. Thus, this text becomes a literal eye-opener for Scully’s art, which can be (re)discovered through his words.

A rumination on authority and its limitations, about what we think we know - and the spaces in between. In Confessions of Narcissus, Scully suggests that our demand for narrative coherence is one of the things that makes our lives so difficult to bear, that when William Hazlitt declared, "It is we who are Hamlet", he was telling us something about Shakespeare's universality that is worth considering: Hamlet does not just give voice to our own fears and anxieties, he also calls them into being. In the process of trying to find cures for ourselves, that is to say, we become creators, to some extent, of our own misfortunes. Confessions of Narcissus builds from the idea that stories are what we require and also (partly) what we suffer from. In this series of observations and aphorisms about literature and life, Scully makes the case that uncertainty isn't an ailment that we should necessarily try to overcome. Following in the tradition of Keats and others, uncertainty may be something that we have good cause to be more curious about, that uncertainty has artistic merit and is a state of being that we might even come to enjoy.

Sean Scully is one of today's best-loved abstract painters. His familiar signature style of lines or bands of colour, alluding to architectural elements such as portals, windows and walls, is one of the most instantly recognizable in contemporary painting. This book brings together for the first time his photographs of the dry stone walls found on the Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland.

Sean Scully (born 1945) is known for rich, painterly abstractions in which stripes or blocks of layered color are a prevailing motif. The delineated geometry of his work provides structure for an expressive, physical rendering of color, light, and texture. Scully's simplification of his compositions and use of repetitive forms--squares, rectangles, bands--echoes architectural motifs (doors, windows, walls) and in this way appeals to a universal understanding and temporal navigation of the picture plane. However, the intimacy of Scully's process, in which he layers and manipulates paint with varying brushstrokes and sensibilities, results in a highly sensual and tactile materiality. His colors and their interactions, often subtly harmonized, elicit profound emotional associations. Scully does not shy away from Romantic ideals and the potential for personal revelation. He strives to combine, as he has said, "intimacy with monumentality." This volume surveys works of the past three years.

This catalog, the second volume in a proposed series of five, chronicles Sean Scully's (born 1945) paintings of the 1980s. Beginning with major breakthrough works early in the decade, it profiles the development of Scully's mature style as well as his growing success in America and internationally. Scully, a native of Ireland, was educated in England and moved to the United States in 1975. By the early 1980s, he was established in New York, where he developed a powerful style of richly painted stripes and shapes with a masterly control of color and strongly built canvases. In a period of low regard for abstract painting, Scully reinvigorated the form to include rich evocations of places, literature and emotion.