Santa Barbara 22

Painter and printmaker Sean Scully began his career in the 1960s as a proponent of Minimalism, an art movement that emphasized highly simplified linear and hard-edged geometric compositions that often concealed the artist’s hand. By the 1980s, Scully had become dissatisfied with the constraints of the cool, emotionally detached qualities of Minimalism, and sought a more lyrical and personally expressive approach. Building on the limited geometric vocabulary of his earlier work, Scully infused his later abstractions—like this monotype of 1987—with a looser, more gestural style that arose from a subtle manipulation of color, tone, texture, and the layering of forms. As a result, Scully’s abstractions took on a poetic tenor, a quality accentuated by Scully’s frequent use of place name titles.