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Sean Scully, 'Landline Green and White', 2014

 

With a dark bedrock at the base of the piece, leading up to a green, almost translucent horizon at the top, Sean Scully presents his Landline Green White as a collection of parallel lines of colour. As if mapping out the layers of earth up towards the heavens, this series was inspired by the Irish landscape, and evokes the Abstract Expressionists working primarily in New York during the 1960s and 1970s. Despite its simplistic formal qualities and restricted colour palette, Scully still invites a viewer to question the meaning of his monumental painting, whilst using interesting materials to flex his capabilities as an artist, and show the range of oils in only six blocks of colour. 

Using aluminium as a ground, Scully instantly takes Abstract Expressionism a stage further through technique, adding a modernist undercurrent to this well-known artistic movement. Giving a shininess to the palette, the aluminium also betrays the painted strokes of Scully's hand, distinct in the upper portions of the work in particular. The viewer's eye begins to notice these imperfections; each line between colour, for instance, is far from uniform, but instead there are peaks and troughs, changes in thickness and thinness, to the separation of colours. Equally, a white dash makes up the centre of the top layer of Landline, which draws the eye in, as it breaks through the tight colour scheme. The ground is also revealed in the middle green section, and these moments of whiteness sweep across the piece as a whole. They serve to prove the evidence of Scully's hand, appreciating the nuances of both automatic painting but also human error, where lines are not smooth, but clearly constructed by the human eye.

There is an obvious debt to Rothko in Scully's Landline series, which moves beyond his usual approach of intersecting blocks of colour. Equally, Scully references many other artists who took on the genre of Colour Field painting - Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Clifford Still and more. The choice of a limited, harmonious colour palette, the linearity of paint application, and the sense of a window into an unknown world, location or landscape, certainly aligns Scully with abstract artists past and present. Additionally, his imitation of Rothko in particular, proves that the impact of Abstract Expressionists among contemporary practitioners remains strong, alongside a market appeal for this type of artwork. The paintings by Rothko and the like have often been compared to landscapes in art historical discourse, which as Scully has noted, is a feature of his Landline series, drawing inspiration from Ireland, and the gap between land and the horizon. However, we still, as viewers, remain unsure if Landline Green White is supposed to evoke a place, or a feeling, or both. It is an isolating canvas of nothingness, sucking us in, yet at the same time it brings us into a discussion to question both its form and associated meanings. Perhaps it is a window into our world. Perhaps it is something else entirely. 

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