The Color of Time: The Photographs of Sean Scully

Painter, photographer, watercolorist, and printmaker Sean Scully roams the world with his camera, capturing its surfaces in places as far-flung as Mexico and the Aran Islands, as close to home as his own studio. His photographs sometimes consist of close-up shots of his own paintings, wherein he zooms in on the material reality of his richly painted surfaces and transforms their colors and shapes into a different abstract configuration. More often, Scully goes from recognizable objects in the larger world to subjective impressions of them. Snapshots of fa ades, windows, and doors are never straightforward recordings of architectural elements. By depicting fading walls, cracked surfaces, rough edges, and the deep shadows created by them, these images capture beauty in decay, and evoke the basic contradiction of nature and life: solidity and fragility, timelessness and change. As metaphors of physical and mental conditions, the photographs capture the memories, feelings, and thoughts connected to the experience of that reality. It is precisely this continuing interchange of the recognizable and abstract worlds, the visible and the invisible, that empowers Scully's works in all media.