John goes to Barcelona to talk to the visual artist Sean Scully, who has celebrated his 70th birthday this year with some 15 exhibitions worldwide. Born in Inchicore, Dublin, in 1945, Scully grew up in Dublin and London. He now lives in New York and also spends time at his studios in Germany and Spain. One of Ireland’s leading painters, Scully is best known for his abstract paintings, his use of a signature grid of vertical and horizontal lines. This year alone, he exhibited at the Venice Biennale for the first time and he became the first Western artist to have a major retrospective in China. He has also been the subject of three shows in Ireland, at the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, the Kerlin, Dublin and the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. Scully has also been working on one of the more unusual commissions of his long career, from the Benedictine monks at the famous monastery of Montserrat, near Barcelona, who asked him to create a permanent exhibition at their 10th century chapel, Church of Santa Cecilia. This is an honour accorded to few artists and sees Scully following in the footsteps such as Rothko and Matisse, with their chapels in Houston, Texas, and Vence, French Riviera respectively. The new work at the Church of Santa Cecilia opened in June 2015.