[The] watercolours are about the extreme absence of physicality. They really are as close as a painter can get to pure light, an effortless, physically effortless vision.

Sean Scully, interview with Ned Rifkin, in Ned Rifkin (ed.), Sean Scully: Twenty years 1976–1995, London: Thames & Hudson, 1995, pp. 57–80 (p. 79).