It’s been an enormous struggle to get where I am … in art school, they kept telling me I had no ability … but it’s a matter of how you see. It’s an act of will, of force.

Sean Scully, cited in Amy Lighthill, ‘Portrait of the artist as lightning rod’, Sean Scully (exhibition catalogue), Pittsburgh: Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, 1985, pp. 6–16 (p. 10).