Sean Scully: Landline

Exhibition catalogue / monograph for the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden / Smithsonian Institution

Essay by Patricia Hickson; interview by Stéphane Aquin; poems by Kelly Grover

From Sean Scully:
I was always looking at the horizon line—at the way the end of the sea touches the beginning of the sky, the way the sky presses down onto the sea, and the way that line (that relationship) is painted. One day I was standing off Ireland, on the edge of Aran Island, looking out. Next stop, America. Standing on the Old World, looking out at (and thinking of my new life in) the New World, as many people have done before … looking out at and hoping for an arrival in America. I think of land, sea, sky. And they always make a massive connection. I try to paint this, this sense of the elemental coming together of land and sea, sky and land, of blocks coming together side by side, stacked in horizon lines endlessly beginning and ending—the way the blocks of the world hug each other and brush up against each other, their weight, their air, their color, and the soft uncertain space between them. I’m putting these into paintings: Landline Sand, Landline Sea, Landline Blue.  

96 pages
8.5 x 11.5 inches