My paintings are very much about power relationships, or they’re about things having to survive within the competition, composition … the composition is a competition for survival. It’s interesting that something small can stand up and be in a composition, dynamically, and have to deal with something much bigger. There’s a sort of equal relationship there.

Sean Scully, interview with Ned Rifkin, in Ned Rifkin (ed.), Sean Scully: Twenty years 1976–1995, London: Thames & Hudson, 1995, pp. 57–80 (p. 66).