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The artist wants his work to reveal everything all at once.

Question: Why did you choose abstraction?

Scully:    Well, it’s quite simple really I think a representational painter wants to show the things in the picture and with an abstract painting what in a sense you are trying to do is make everything happen at once.  Now the other day I was in the Bon Art Exhibition.  And Bon Art said whose Bon Art figurative painter of course and considered at one point retrograde and anti-madness.  Working in the face of abstraction and cubism and hanging on to the figure, relentlessly hanging on to the figure.  And he said I want to give the impression that when you walk into a room you see everything and nothing.  And I would say that I want to show everything all at once.  I once read a very interesting piece of graffiti when I was at the university which said time was invented to stop everything happening at once.  She’s quite sweet.  In an abstract painting it should be, could be possibly a moment of revelation and it’s a kind of thinking that takes you out of context, so that is his big advantage I think.


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