I had someone speaking to me the other day about the sublime and the transcendental, and I said my work wasnt all that transcendental. It has mystery in it, and it’s very hot and romantic, but I’m not working toward any absolute. I will talk about the realism in the work, it’s physicality and the violence of cutting into surfaces. I’m quite rutheless and relentless. The works are all about these tensions and contradictions in me. They’re formal yet they’re sexual, austere and mysterious at the same time. Mysterious to me also.

Sean Scully, interview with Adrian Dannatt, ‘I don’t have the American ambition of being the next great abstract artist’, Flash Art, vol. 25, no. 164, May–June 1992, pp. 103–105 (p. 105).