Project #1: Sean Scully, Grids and Stripes

Sean Scully is an Irish born American artist who paints and creates sculptures based on grids. A basic grid is a set of horizontal, side to side lines, and vertical, up and down lines, that create squares and/or rectangles.  You may have seen a grid on graph paper that is used in some math classes like the one below. 

Scully often works with muted colors but sometimes mixes bright colors and muted colors.  Many of his works are large scale, wall size or larger.  Sometimes his stripes and rectangles have soft painterly edges and other times crisp hard edges.  Sometimes he mixes them in the same painting.  

Below is an example of one of Mr. Scully's sculptures which is crisp and bright compared to the interior space that it is in.  This kind of juxtaposition (placement of two different things side by side to compare and contrast them) creates a very nice contrast.  Both the rigid geometric and brightly colored sculpture and complex curvy and neutral colored architecture are complimented when they are viewed together.  

Scully's artworks look nice in both minimal spaces such as the gallery rooms above and the classic architectural space below.

There are many ways that you can create some artworks inspired by Sean Scully.  The simplest way is to create a grid on paper and add color to it using markers, colored pencils or water based paint.  Don't worry about the edges of the grid being straight.  Follow Scully's example and create some nice soft edges.

If you are painting and want to make some muted colors mix a tiny bit of the opposite color on the color wheel with the color that you want to mute.  For example: a tiny bit of red mutes green, a tiny bit of yellow mutes purple and a tiny bit of orange mutes blue. See the student example below.

You can also create a grid with a mixture of soft and hard edges like the one below.  I like to use Frogtape-delicate surface to create straight crisp edges.  It is the best tape that I've found for creating crisp painted edges without damaging the painting when you remove the tape. This technique works best with acrylic paints. The student example below also includes some metallic colors.

To create something like Scully's stacked sculptures make a painted collage.  This student collage was made from stiff product packaging paper.  The painted strips were glued onto a larger piece of paper with Elmer's Glue All.  Glue All works very well for collages.

You can go a step further and make a 3- Dimensional maquette. A maquette is a small model of a sculpture that an artist makes to decide if he/she does want to take the next step and make the sculpture larger and with permanent materials.  A  collage like the one above or a small paper maquette could be attached to a large xerox of an interior space such as the ones below to see what it might look like as a real sculpture. 

Vocabulary:  grid, vertical, horizontal, square, rectangle, graph paper, painterly, interior, juxtaposition, curvy, rigid, surface, juxtaposition, architectural, muted, 2D, 3D, collages, bas relief, maquette, model 

Please send images of artworks created after reading this lesson.  I will post them.