- Artist
- Sean Scully born 1945
- Medium
- Oil paint on canvas
- Dimensions
- Displayed: 2743 × 3049 × 70 mm
support (I): 2743 × 1526 × 70 mm
support (II): 2740 × 1523 × 70 mm - Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Purchased from Timothy Taylor Gallery with funds provided by Mr and Mrs Jonathan Green 2003
- Reference
- T11782
Summary
Coyote 2000 is a large, abstract oil painting featuring an asymmetrical arrangement of rectangles, which have loosely defined edges and are organised horizontally and vertically on the canvas. The mostly uniform size and shape of the rectangles and their tightly packed formation gives the impression of an orderly pattern, yet while some shapes are directly aligned as if they form a grid, others are arranged more haphazardly. The painting is largely executed in muted colours, including beige, cream, green and different tones of grey, but some of its rectangles are also painted in a strong black tone. The paint has been loosely applied throughout, with brush marks clearly visible on the surface of the work. While each rectangle is dominated by a single hue, further layers of paint can often be seen beneath the upper coats and as a result the rectangles each have slightly varying tones. The colours of these underneath layers are also occasionally revealed in the narrow gaps that appear between the shapes, although in many places the rectangles overlap at the edges, so that their tones bleed into each other.
This work was produced by the painter Sean Scully in 2000. Scully was born in Dublin but grew up in London and settled in America in 1975, and at the time that Coyote was created Scully was working between studios in New York, Barcelona and Munich. He began making this work by spreading the linen canvas over two wooden stretchers and then priming it. Although the subsequent process has not been recorded, Scully almost always starts his paintings by drawing the composition onto the canvas before applying pigment (Scully in Walter Smerlig, ‘Interview’, in Constantinople or the Sensual Concealed: The Imagery of Sean Scully, exhibition catalogue, Museum Küppersmühle für Moderne Kunst, Duisberg 2009, unpaginated). Scully mixes his paints himself and for Coyote he applied the oils to the canvas in multiple thin layers, resulting in an uneven but glossy finish.
Although Scully has not explained the title of this work, the colours of the painting resemble the grey, tan and black tones of a coyote’s fur, and this may relate to the artist’s travels in Mexico, where coyotes are abundant. Coyote is one of several works from 1999 and the early 2000s that Scully produced after rediscovering a watercolour study that he had executed in Mexico in 1984. This study was composed of rectangles in horizontal and vertical positions and Scully adopted this format for Coyote (and its related aquatint, Coyote 2003, Tate P20282) as well as the oil painting Wall of Light Desert Day 2003 (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra). He stated in 2000 that this type of composition was inspired by the Mexican ruins he saw during his 1984 trip, especially the ‘stacking of stones, and the way light hits those facades’ (Scully in Phillips Collection 2005, p.24).
The group of works that Scully began in 1999 that includes Coyote marked a shift in the artist’s practice. During the 1980s and 1990s he had primarily produced paintings that comprised multiple canvases arranged together in different formations (see, for example, Paul 1984, Tate T04138), but from 1999 onwards Scully turned to the single canvas format. Whereas the earlier paintings look relatively flat and their main compositional focus is often on the spatial relationships between the different panels, the single-canvas works suggest depth through textured brushwork and the appearance of layers of colour behind and between the shapes. As the curator Stephen Bennett Phillips has stated regarding the artist’s work of this period, ‘Scully’s dual goals are an apparent depth of paint (without thick physicality) from which light emerges, and a surface animated by visible brushstrokes. He achieves this by layering four or five coats of paint. As the layers build up, a sense of background and foreground develops’ (Phillips Collection 2005, p.45).
Further reading
Sean Scully: Wall of Light, exhibition catalogue, Centro de Arté Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro 2002, reproduced pp.22–3.
Sean Scully: Body of Light, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 2004.
Sean Scully: Wall of Light, exhibition catalogue, Phillips Collection, Washington D.C. 2005, reproduced p.82.
David Hodge
December 2014
Supported by Christie’s.
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