I came late to an awareness of the Irish abstractionist Sean Scully, but I came to that awareness in the best possible way – bumping into accidental contact with the work itself, all unmediated.
This was last year at the newly rebuilt De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, and I was wandering through the galleries devoted to contemporary painting, not much engaged by anything I was seeing.
I was, if truth be told, spending more time looking through the big sheets of plate glass at the sculpture garden outside than at the two-dimensional art on the walls in front of me.
But then out of nowhere, and entirely unprepared, I got hit with my first sight of a Sean Scully painting. Larger than life, and pulsating.
Images here are stills from a film by German director Hans Andreas Guttner.
