Scully is a leading representative of a new generation of abstract painters. The stripe is Sean Scully's building block, and it is the structure from which he fashions compositions of intense emotion. This American painter of Irish birth was first drawn to minimalism when in 1967 he discovered through reproductions the art of Rothko. His alternation of horizontals and verticals plays like a musicians notes; each arrangement is a complex nuanced reflection of universal and personal pathos and always more than the sum of its parts.

While smaller and lesser known than his large, heroic paintings, Scully's works on paper record in their markings the physical energy of their creation. Through most of the 1980s he made woodblocks, he particularly enjoyed the physicality of the cutting process and the feeling of freedom he could create which in turn for Scully translated in to honesty and integrity. He would permit light through layers of colours which would vibrate a positive statement of belief. In Scully's words- light=hope=faith.

In 1991 working on five etchings with Jennifer Melby, Scully finds his apotheosis in the reduction and simplication of the Durango prints. The following year, with the etcher Mohammad Khalil, Scully makes eight powerfully evocative and atmospheric etchings to accompany Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness which was a favourite of Scully's for it's essential moral conflict . After an interlude of woodblocks, Scully returns once again to etchings. This time a set of thirteen emotionally rich prints to accompany James Joyce's Pomes Penyeach. The poems trace Joyce's intimately personal journey through life which he wrote over a twenty year period. Acting like a complete portrait of Joyce they have an intensity and range of human expression which appealed to Scully who communicated this through the somber and delicate tonality of the works. A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight, with its bilateral pure lines on the left and horizontal bands on the right prefigures the more narrow format of the 1998 Mirror Smoke prints. The final print of the book The Prayer, looks forward also to the 1998 aquatint series Enter Six, in its exploration of the encounter between a passive, receiving form and an active message bearing one entering from the left.

Scully in 1996 went to set up a studio in Barcelona where he completed two print sets; Barcelona Diptych and Raval. His works often reflected his location and here they have a certain vibrancy and sensuousness that is found in Barcelona. In contrast during the same year he began a collaboration with Gregory Burnet in New York and created the Five Unions set which were much smaller than the Spanish prints and created a wonderfully meditative and visionary quality.