Breaking the rules

Sean Scully, whose latest exhibition is running at the Kerlin Gallery is, as he says himself, a painter who has made a career out of painting "a bunch of stripes." Stripes in various permutations - in interlocking colour blocks, in impassive parallel bands, in big architectonic columns - have been his basic compositional unit throughout his career. That career began in England in the early 1970s and has gone from strength to strength in his current home, New York.

His great achievement is, as one commentator put it, to have "humanised" abstraction, but he would certainly argue that abstract painting doesn't need to be humanised, that it is altogether human. Rather, he has demonstrated that the language of abstract painting, largely dismissed as passe, still has a great deal to say and remains capable of yielding extraordinary artistic richness. He's done so not by any polemical means, but simply by painting pictures.

Scully was born in Dublin, but his family moved to England when he was just four years old. He was brought up in south London and traces of an East End accent are still there in his speech. Yet it's clear that his Irishness is particularly important to him and he has made a point of exhibiting here regularly.

He was, as he puts it, "put to print" when he was 15, apprenticed to a type-setter in a commercial printers. He loved setting up type, and it has since occurred to him that the "windows" in many of his paintings, into which smaller painted panels are inserted, have their genesis in the windows left in block of type for illustrations. He went on to work in an ad agency, then took art classes at night at the Central School of Art before studying full-time at Newcastle University.

He cites two major influences in his conversion to abstract art. The first was the great Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko, about whose work he's written very eloquently. He came across a catalogue and was first perplexed, then fascinated at the way Rothko could engender such meaningful intensity in a form as apparently empty and banal as a simple rectangle.

The other was the renowned English painter Bridget Riley, who was then enjoying - or enduring - virtual celebrity status, her Op Art abstracts somehow chiming with the mood of the time.

You can see how the rigour, seriousness and sheer concentration of both Rothko and Riley would appeal to Scully, and the influence of the latter, particularly, is evident in the optical effects of his early work.

But he moved on, in several senses of the term. Though he had the beginnings of a very promising career in England, he was unhappy with what he saw as the provincialism and constraints of the society. America, and specifically Manhattan, beckoned. After a one-year foray he made the decision and moved over. He has described the Manhattan art world as "a battleground of ideas," but then, he's someone who, as he says himself, likes being in a fight, and he hasn't looked back. The critic Robert Hughes once described him as "one of the most toughly individual artists in the United States". He keeps a house and studio in London, and visits Barcelona, but Manhattan is home, and a couple of years ago he bought a former taxi-cab garage in Chelsea that is now his studio.

Over the past two decades he has worked on permutations of the stripe, progressively opening it out from the initial defensiveness of his first American paintings. Impeccable, machined-looking edges have given way to the fallible touch of the human hand. At first colour hardly found its way into his stark tonal compositions.

He is still in love with the clarity of black and white, and with infinite varieties of grey, but he has increasingly explored colour, though he usually, as he puts it, "knocks it down a tone or two." If some of his compositions can be associated with the grid of New York's street plan, unlike his predecessor Piet Mondrian he brings to it the atmospheric bruising of a lived-in city, a city worn by time and weather and use.

It might seem strange to speak of such things in relation to an abstract painter, but the colour and texture and feeling of the environment somehow find their way into the work. It looks weathered itself, heroic and monumental, static and stubborn. When Scully says he likes the moments when day gives way to night, and when autumn modulates into winter, you can get an inkling of the subdued, melancholy resonance that characterises his paintings.

Over the past year he has made a series of critically acclaimed works that represent his most complex, sustained engagement with colour yet, harking back, perhaps, to an early encounter with brilliant colour in Morocco that inspired him on a visit there in 1969.

These Wall of Light paintings, while they feature luscious combinations and layerings of colour, are as measured and restrained as ever, and they suggest an artist increasingly confident of his prowess. The title is appropriate because, while the compositions still look as if they are built with solid, intractable blocks, they also have a real lightness, a radiant buoyancy about them.

If his initial Manhattan paintings were walls to keep the world at bay, these see him relaxed enough to open the shutters and let in some sunlight. Not too relaxed, though. This, after all is the man who describes his working method thus: "When I'm painting I'm not messing around. Everything is a home run."

Sean Scully, New Paintings is at the Kerlin Gallery until November 15th