I'm the product of a smashed-up family': how Sean Scully became the greatest abstract painter alive

"The meaning of his art is something you feel, not something you can easily describe. He has more in common with Davis and Coltrane than with the Beatles. In addition to improvisational brilliance, his new paintings even colour-match with Coltrane's classic album Blue Train and Davis's Kind of Blue. For Scully, the greatest living abstract painter, is playing the blues in Paris."

"Even now, I am terrified of the dark. I can't cross a room or get out of my car in the dark Those blues have been with Scully since childhood. I got interested in blue because I had the blues. He is still driven by pain, he tells me, over green tea in an upper room of the gallery. Even now I'm terrified of the dark."

Sean Scully paints rectangles, squares and strips of colour that abut and slide into each other, producing textured abstract compositions that read as instrumental music rather than pop. The works evoke improvisational blues and are compared to Miles Davis and John Coltrane for their wordless emotional power, even colour-matching classic jazz albums. The current exhibition in Paris presents long, smoky blue notes alternating with black, red and brown, generating a slow, sad beauty. Personal anguish and a lifelong fear of the dark inform the palette and mood, creating turbulence beneath orderly rectangular patterns.

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