Sean Scully: My “Collaborative” with Landscape

Painter Sean Scully creates a “collaborative” visual experience between myself, the viewer, and his monumental, abstract, horizontal-striped landscapes. I am repeatably engulfed into “deep and resonant” color through a succession of works in the exhibition “Landline” at the Wadsworth Atheneum; they are the bookends to my immersive and contemplative dialogue into Scully’s expression of the natural world. In unconstrained bands of pure, glimmering color– turbulent blues, emerald greens, burnt oranges–unsurveyed land, water and sky, Scully creates a vertical composition of beauty and energy!

I attended the opening reception for Sean Scully and had the great pleasure of speaking with him. I shared that I presented to my Art History students one of his landscape paintings juxtaposed with a Venetian painting by Renaissance artist Giovanni Bellini (“St Francis in Ectasy“) He was pleased that students, many who are working artists, are able to experience landscape through his contemporary lens. 🙂