Lot Essay
Maurice Poirier in his monograph (Sean Scully, New York, 1990, p.62) comments 'From 1977 on, he made paintings that were totally black or of such a somber tonality that the name 'black paintings' has been given to them as a group. When he began reintroducing recognizable colors around 1979, these remained within the dark end of the spectrum. The majority of the paintings executed by Scully during that period consist of a single unit, the others being mostly two-part and three-part works. Acrylic continued to be used but increasingly in competition with oil ... From the interaction between the stripes and their background, subtle variations emerge, imparting to the compositions a living presence evocative of muted musical strains ... Technically, the paintings under discussion adhere to a rigorous system that included precise duplication of the stripes' dimensions. Scully's procedure was first to paint the entire canvas the color of the ground. After laying masking tape from edge to edge, he would build up the stripes by applying two or more coats either of the same color as the ground or different ones ... In some works, especially the earlier ones, Scully might leave a portion of the tape on the canvas, while in others the differences in surface quality result entirely from the thickness of the paint ... 'I was playing around with the idea of the physicality of the paint', Scully explains ... the artist had begun experimenting with such illusionistic contrasts in 1977. As he explains it, his interest had been to establish a type of 'figure-ground' relationship, so that the painting would be about relief as well as about color'.