Ned Rifkin: What is the black and white?
You come back to black and white all the time,
so how is it for you? What does it represent?

Sean Scully: It’s the absolute colour equivalent of the horizontal and the vertical. So when I’m doing something in black and white that’s horizontal and vertical, I am at my purest. I am at my most fundamental, my most unworldly, probably, my most unsensuous, and perhaps my most spiritually ambitious.

Sean Scully, interview with Ned Rifkin, in Ned Rifkin (ed.), Sean Scully: Twenty years 1976–1995, London: Thames & Hudson, 1995, pp. 57–80 (p. 77).