Untitled 1983

Here are Sean Scully’s stripes, made on paper with oil stick. You can see the blue-green and black verticals against a spine of orange and green squares. It makes me think of a city, of course, but also of Agnes Martin’s grids, and maybe even Rothko’s stacked rectangles – but looser, more lived-in. Imagine Scully making this, pressing the oil stick hard, letting the texture of the paper come through. There’s something deeply satisfying about that kind of directness. It’s not about perfection but about feeling. The slightly wobbly lines, the way the colors shift – it’s all so human. I see this as part of an ongoing conversation. Artists like Scully, like me, are constantly talking to each other across time, borrowing, reacting, and pushing things further. The history of painting is about building on what came before. Painting doesn’t give us fixed answers but lets us stay in the question.