If you choose the fine arts, you are left with an object. If you choose the martial arts, you are left with a memory. What I try to do is take this knowledge, this way of being which Karate embraces, and put it into my paintings … Life is banal until it is invested with a commitment and painting and karate are no different from anything else in that respect. The forms which I use in my painting, the stripes, may appear to be banal, but they are given another life when the body and the intellect and the emotions are harnessed together.

Sean Scully, cited in Paul Bonaventura, ‘It’s all a question of intensity’,
Sean Scully (exhibition catalogue), London: Waddington Galleries, 1992, n.p.