Sean Scully: [My pastels] don’t have the material certainty of the paintings. So the relationship between the idea and the material is more fragile in the pastels. With the pastels it’s almost as if you could blow them away. It’s like dust in the desert. They are very interesting to make — that you’re pressing down powder.

Hans-Michael Herzog: That’s very ephemeral in a way.

Sean Scully: I think the pastels have that quality — they hover between being there and not being there.

Sean Scully, interview with Hans-Michael Herzog, ‘The beauty of the real’,
Sean Scully (exhibition catalogue), Milan: Charta, 1996, pp. 55–131 (pp. 97–99).