“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…stacked in horizon lines endlessly beginning and ending….”

—Sean Scully

Forged from the elemental forces of land, sea, and sky, Sean Scully’s Landline Dark Blue, 2017, stands as a testament to abstraction’s enduring emotional power. A brooding meditation rendered in oil on aluminum, the work belongs to Scully’s celebrated Landline series, where horizon-like bands of saturated color dissolve the boundaries between the physical and the spiritual. Since 1999, Scully has pursued this ongoing body of lyrical paintings as a means to “integrate all the parts” of the horizon—physical and philosophical, poetic and pastoral.ⁱ Known for merging the geometry of European concrete art with the ethereality of American abstraction, Scully adopts thick, gestural brushstrokes that channel the energy and beauty of the natural world. These paintings mark a decisive evolution from the tightly gridded compositions of the late 1970s and 1980s—such as the Overlay and Backs and Fronts series—retaining their formal rigor while embracing a more atmospheric, tactile sensibility that reaffirms abstraction’s relevance in the 21st century. The Landlines gained widespread acclaim following the series’ debut at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, where a selection of paintings was installed at the Palazzo Falier. Works from the series have been the focus of major institutional exhibitions, including a 2018 presentation at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., which traveled to the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, and an exhibition at the Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice in 2019.

Emerging from the rigorous geometry of his earlier grids, Scully’s Landline series are a pivotal shift in both style and spirit. Influenced by a personal period of upheaval, including a significant back injury and the loss of his son, the artist abandoned the rigid urban energy of his earlier canvases in favor of broad, fluid vistas. These paintings are drawn from the artist’s natural surroundings of his Hudson River studio space but are equally infused with undercurrents of the emotional weather of life. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Landline Dark Blue, where impasto strata of cerulean, rust, and midnight coalesce into a melancholic, meditative field.

The initial inspiration for the Landline series can be traced to a photograph Scully took while standing on a cliff edge in Norfolk, Ireland. Capturing the elemental divisions of grassy earth, the North Sea, and the leaden sky, the image distilled the natural world into horizontal bands — a compositional structure that would later evolve into the spiritual architecture of his Landlines. This encounter with the natural sublime first ignited Scully's lifelong exploration of elemental borders — where land, sea, and sky coalesce.

Venice, with its shifting light and watery topography, seems to have left a lasting imprint on Scully’s painterly sensibility, subtly informing the distinctive visual language of his subsequent Landlines. In Landline Dark Blue, opulent bands of teal and what can only be described as Venetian red evoke the cyan shimmer of the lagoon and the scorched hues of sunlit brick. Scully distills the essence of the dappled canals and linear waterways that carve their way through the ancient city, translating the memory of gondolas gliding across water and soft waves against masonry into broad, horizontal gestures of paint. These wavering bands transport us to the Venetian landscape, conjuring visions of burning sunsets and blue-green light dissolving into stone.

“Vertical shapes will always convey the energy of action... Horizontal stripes are like the horizon—resting, in repose. They are tranquil.” 

—Sean Scully

Sumptuous and austere, Landline Dark Blue capitalizes on the unlikely marriage of oil and aluminum. The smooth, non-porous surface forces the paint to float atop the metal, heightening the gestural urgency of Scully’s brushwork. “I used metal in the first place to set up a material contrast with the humid romance of the paint,” the artist recalled, “setting up something emotional against a material emphatically of our age.”ⁱⁱ The resulting surface captures both the luminosity of reflected light and the tactile density of pigment, creating an effect that oscillates between the physical and the transcendent.

The elemental structure of Landline Dark Blue acts as both metaphor and memory. The stacked bands of color suggest not only literal horizons—the meeting points of earth, water, and air—but also the thresholds between past and present, grief and recovery. This work reflects the effects of Scully’s nomadic movements, from Ireland to England to the United States, his crossings and returns subtly encoded in the blending hues. As one stands before Landline Dark Blue, the eye travels laterally across the surface, echoing the soothing, side-to-side motion that Scully found both physically and emotionally healing after his injury and his loss.

The emotional resonance of Landline Dark Blue situates it within a broader tradition of spiritual abstraction. Echoes of Mark Rothko’s color fields—with their soft transitions and concentrated emotive force—are palpable in Scully’s treatment of the painted surface. While Rothko’s vertical formats reach skyward in search of drama and transcendence, Scully’s horizontal expanses remain grounded, evoking the endless repose of the landscape and the steady, rhythmic pulse of nature. “I’m really in the business of unifying these two tendencies that have been at odds in our human history for a very long time: the logical and the romantic,” he told Hirshhorn director Melissa Chiu, expressing his desire to “rescue abstraction from the abstract.”ⁱⁱⁱ

In this quest for the infinite, Scully finds an unlikely kinship with Yves Klein, whose explorations of his saturated International Klein Blue aimed to evoke the immaterial vastness of sky and sea. Scully’s midnight blues, layered with hints of teal and rust, seem to hover between substance and atmosphere, suggesting a similar embrace of the infinite — but one grounded in memory and earth rather than pure void. There is, too, a nod to Courbet’s earthen palettes and Titian’s richly layered glazes — artists Scully attests he has “looked at...adoringly for so many hours,” absorbing their lessons into the fleshy ochres and bloodied reds that emerge amid his cooler bands.^iv

Landline Dark Blue acts as both mirror and portal, reflecting the viewer’s own sensations while inviting passage into a dreamlike, borderless terrain. Reducing impressions, memories, and emotions to their most essential and resonant forms, his subject is, at its core, the fleeting emotion invoked by place—a singular yet universal experience that shapes how we move through the world. The painting offers a quiet space for contemplation, where the natural world and the emotional one meet in stillness, just beyond the edge of vision.

ⁱSean Scully, quoted in “Sean Scully at Lisson Gallery,” émergent magazine, 2021, online.
ⁱⁱSean Scully, quoted February 3, 2009; cited on the artist’s official Instagram account, posted December 23, 2016, online.
ⁱⁱⁱSean Scully quoted in Roger Catlin, “Sean Scully’s Artworks are a Study in Colour, Horizon and Life’s Sorrows,” Smithsonian Magazine, September 20, 2018, online.
^ivIbid.