Artist Talk | Shadows in Nature: Renowned Painter Sean Scully on the Enduring Legacy of John Constable
In this special conversation at the YCBA, acclaimed British painter Sean Scully will join Martina Droth, Paul Mellon Director, YCBA, to reflect on Constable’s work and legacy while also offering insights and reflections into his own artistic practice.
About this program
The YCBA’s exhibition, John Constable: The Landscape Reimagined, opens September 3. It is the only major US exhibition of this seminal British landscape artist on the occasion of his 250th birthday.
Renowned painter Sean Scully moved to Hampstead in 2021—more than two hundred years after Constable moved there (in 1819). For two years Scully walked across the same expanse of Hampstead Heath that became such an important subject in Constable’s art to get to his studio each day.
In Constable, the Dublin-born Scully recognizes a kindred artistic spirit. Fostered under the same dark, wet light, theirs is a shared sense of materiality, with a color sense that is often tonal. The horizon lines of land, sea, and sky are an enduring theme for both—Constable considered sky to be “the chief organ of sentiment” in a painting—and it is through their mutual interest in nature, in particular the shadows in nature, that their work evokes emotion.
For those who cannot make it in person, this event will be livestreamed. Click here to watch the free livestream.
About the speaker
Sean Scully is considered one of the greatest living abstract painters. Combining European painting tradition with the distinct character of American abstraction, his paintings are often structured around layered blocks of color arranged horizontally and vertically, achieving a balance between calm reflection and vitality.
Recent major career retrospectives include Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2021-2022), with twenty other significant museum retrospectives worldwide since then, including Sean Scully: A Romantic Geometry of Colors, at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2024), and in 2025, major shows at the Parrish Art Museum, NY; Bucerius KunstForum, Hamburg; Daegu Art Museum, South Korea, and Fundaciè Catalunya La Pedrera, Barcelona.
Scully lives and works between New York, Bavaria, and Aix-en-Provence.
Please join us for a special curator tour of John Constable: The Landscape Reimagined at 4 pm! (see below for more).
Image credit
Sean Scully. Photo credit: Helge Mundt, 2025
This program is presented through the generosity of the Terry F. Green 1969 Fund for British Art and Culture.
