When I’m painting, I’m overlaying and overlaying and I might paint a painting green and I end up painting it black and white and the green is somehow influencing, what you’re looking at. The green informs the tremor along the edges, between the colours. So that what you’re seeing is perhaps a black and white painting, but what you are feeling is a green painting. So that the experience becomes extremely complex. And that’s my intention. It’s the tremor between things that the overlaying of colour can achieve. So that traces of what’s left along the edge or what’s underneath can be felt, but perhaps not seen. And it’s the difference between feeling something and knowing something.

Sean Scully, interview with Hans-Michael Herzog, ‘The beauty of the real’,
Sean Scully (exhibition catalogue), Milan: Charta, 1996, pp. 55–131 (p. 123).