Untitled (6.24.92) 1992

Sean Scully made this ‘Untitled’ work on paper in 1992 using watercolor. Look at those initial washes of color—the sienna against the blue, and then those yellows and blacks bumping up against one another! I imagine Scully working with this color palette over and over, trying to get a sense of how they sit together, how they push apart. I can see him working on this painting. He’s stepping back, squinting, considering… trying to get those horizontals just right. Did he allow the watercolor to bleed? Or did he decide to control it? Maybe he was even trying to invoke Agnes Martin, who also explored grids and used watercolor. Artists are always talking to each other across time like that. The more you look, the more you can tell this painting is about touch, surface, and those subtle variations within those repeated lines. It's like Scully is searching for a structure and a feeling at the same time. And he’s allowing space for error, intuition, and emergence. It's all there, in those simple stripes.