To understand it Is to own it: Sean Scully on collecting

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Show Us Your Walls
By Kathryn Shattuck
The artist Sean Scully standing between a Serge Poliakoff painting and a Walker Evans photograph in his studio in Tappan, N.Y. Credit Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
TAPPAN, N.Y. — The walls of Sean Scully’s art studio in this quiet hamlet are lined with paintings for which he is famous — bars and blocks in muscular, vibrating hues — and others for which he is not: portraits of his son Oisín, now 8, at play on a beach in Eleuthera, the Bahamas. But the walls leading to his inner sanctum are another thing entirely, hung with works by other artists that Mr. Scully says he simply likes to “feed off”: a 1935 Walker Evans photograph of a New Orleans barber shop that reminds him of his deceased father, a barber in Dublin and then London; “All you need is love, love, love,” a 2009 Damien Hirst butterfly-heart silk-screen print inscribed with a lewd dedication; and “Early Morning, Montclair, New Jersey,” an 1892 George Inness landscape reminiscent of the Rockland County terrain where Mr. Scully lives with his wife, the Swiss painter Liliane Tomasko. [More]