All There Is 1986

Sean Scully made this painting, "All There Is," from two panels covered with horizontal bands of off-white, gold, blue, and black. You can see that the surface is built up from many thin layers of paint, dragged across in slightly imperfect horizontal gestures. I can imagine Sean, in his studio, maybe stepping back and squinting, trying to get it just right. The gold feels sunny but also aged and worn, like an old photograph. He must have been thinking about how colors change each other, and what happens at the edges of these bands. What is it like to decide where one band ends and another begins? There's something very human about the scale and the slightly wonky geometry. Scully’s definitely in conversation with other stripe painters like Agnes Martin or even Barnett Newman, but in the end, he’s doing his own thing. Painting is such an ongoing conversation. We're all just riffing off each other, trying to make sense of the world, one brushstroke at a time.