Sotto Voce, 1988

Widely acclaimed for his abstract oil paintings, Sean Scully is an artist whose works often combine geometric structures with contrasting soft edges and thick uneven surfaces to form alternating panels of coloured squares or stripes – such works as Green Ascending and Rouge perfectly exemplify his trademark style of painting. Although his abstract works appear to have no specific reference, Scully’s previous employment as a typesetter had a great bearing on his later artistic outputs, and of his Land Sea exhibition, Scully noted that his experience of visiting Venice was a major influence as he sought to recreate ‘the movement of the water, how it heaves against the brick and stone of the city’; the artist also noted that his earliest memory of art is of a series of devotional paintings on show at a local Catholic church where he grew up, commenting that they were ‘very geometric, like Russian paintings.’ (Artist website)