Untitled

Watercolour and graphite on paper. Accompanied by a certificate of authenticity. An early work on paper, made while Scully was living in London and before his move to New York the following year. The sheet is divided into three passages that read as successive attempts at the same problem: a grid drawn in pencil at the upper left, a block of dense graphite hatching at the right, and a sequence of red watercolour bars along the lower edge. The interest is in what the drawing shows about method. Scully was working through the woven, interlocking grids that preoccupied him in the early seventies, and the sheet lets the process remain visible — the ruled construction lines are not erased, and the red bars sit on top of them without concealing them. The horizontal band, laid down as discrete units of colour separated by intervals of bare paper, anticipates the stripe paintings that would define his work from the end of the decade onward.