Aran 2005

This is Sean Scully's photograph "Aran". It's a landscape of a stone wall in a field. Look at how Scully has chosen to frame the wall so it runs straight across. I find it very moving. Scully is known for his paintings of stripes and grids. Here, he is creating a similar sensation through these stacked stones in a field. He might have seen a direct relationship between the structures and patterns in the landscape and the abstract forms he was working with. It makes me wonder, was he thinking about how the act of building a wall is similar to the act of building a painting, one stone or brushstroke at a time? The horizontality of the wall suggests stability, and the variations in tone and texture give it a kind of visual rhythm. And even though it’s just a wall, there’s something profound about it. It reminds me of the way that artists are in constant conversation, across time, with each other. The simplest forms can hold so much depth.