Sean Scully has taken a new approach to abstraction. He draws inspiration from his early photographs and reduces nature to bands of color layered on the canvas, creating an uncanny sense of depth. A quote from the book, Sean Scully Home, describes his work with clarity.
A 1999 photograph, Landline, brings us close to the enduring fascinations – and insistent forces – at the heart of Sean Scully’s work. It is a judiciously cropped image of an unidentified coastline: a picture free of contextualising information, concentrating on the essential encounter between land and sea. Rippling, modulating, blue-green ocean water turns to spreading foamy whiteness as gently churning waves break on a stretch of grey gravelly shore. It is a situation of fundamental contact and contrast.