Sean Scully, Land Sea Sky, 1999.
Image courtesy of the Wall Street Journal.
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.
Sean Scully, Landline Black Blue, 2014.
Image courtesy of Kerlin Gallery.
Sean Scully, Iris, 2015.
Image courtesy of Kerlin Gallery.
Sean Scully, Landline Green Below, 2014.
Image courtesy of Kerlin Gallery.