To move into the fiction — which is the space between the stripes, all that brushwork — to move into the fiction, and to move out of the fiction, to be aware that you’re in the world and at the same time … imagine standing on the edge of the world, if the world was flat, [where you] could see that amazing immense space out there and at the same time — you haven’t fallen off — realise that you are standing on the edge: that’s the kind of situation that I’m trying to maintain in these paintings.

Sean Scully, cited in John Caldwell, ‘The new paintings’, Sean Scully (exhibition catalogue), Pittsburgh: Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, 1985, pp. 17–21 (p. 20).