REGINA SCULLY VISUAL ARTIST INTERVIEW BY HARRYET CANDEE PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF ARTIST
Regina, your paintings are beautiful. For me, they each depict different worlds you travel to and explore, a brave pioneer bringing back information on faraway worlds. Is this how you see them as well? REGINA: Yes, exactly. The idea of traveling while standing still has always intrigued me. Painting is a wonderful vehicle for this. Once you get inside a painting, there are so many possibilities to explore and interesting accidental spaces and vignettes to discover both while creating the piece and later in viewing it. I have always taken solace in the fact that I can travel a lot in my mind and in my art. My paintings as personal journeys to exotic worlds. They are all improvisational. I always start the painting in a different way than I have before….and a dialogue begins. I don’t know yet if the painting will start to hum and rise in volume, and if the painting and I will find res-
PHOTOGRAPHY OF ART IMAGES BY GARY GITTELSON
olution and magic together in the end. But I hope we will, and I coax the painting throughout the long process to develop and evolve to this end. Can you give an interpretation of your work? I am looking at Inner Journey, one of your works on paper. REGINA: The titles of my series give a good overall idea about my work. My first serious solo exhibition was in New Orleans in 2008 and titled, Excavations. After Excavations came Navigations, Passages, Horizons, Inner Journeys, and I am currently still working with Mindscapes. In essence, my paintings are about taking a journey and exploring both the painting and oneself. The concept of taking a journey through a painting was central to Chinese painting centuries ago. Without getting too ac-
22 • AUGUST INTO SEPTEMBER 2021 THE ARTFUL MIND
ademic, I would like to mention the book, Introduction to Chinese Art, where Michael Sullivan discusses landscape as the “opening of a door.” He discusses how taking a break during the day to contemplate and enter a painted landscape in the mind’s eye, was recognized as “a source of spiritual solace and refreshment.” While early western landscape painting used linear perspective and exercised ideas of power over space, Eastern landscape involved a spiritual contemplation of nature from afar to create a sense of vastness in the world. This was the subject of my thesis in graduate school, and I take great inspiration from this idea -that a contemplative spiritual approach to painting allows for exploration of a landscape that is reflective in some way of the viewer’s own mind. I also explored this concept when developing my exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of
