Sean Scully (b. 1945)

Sean Scully: On Colour

'Thinking about the colour in my work, and its darkness ... I often think about how the light in my work - the light produced by this colour, which is so emphatically attached to its own body weight, its own gravity - has a tendency to to fall back into the painting. The painting has to be opened up.

The colour, of course, could be opened up. Red could be bright red. Yellow could be the colour of flowers. And green could be leaf green. This would make the painting more immediate, more obviously communicative, more readily available ... and less burdened by the issue of interior content.

My painting, however, is a compression: a compression of form, edge, weight. And colour participates in this density. The painting is immediate since it is painted aggressively, by hand; yet it is difficult because it is compressed. The light in the painting has to be opened up, pulled out.

And it is exactly this difficulty that gives the work its interior life. It is an incarnation, not an explanation'

The Artist, May 2004.

(see F. Ingleby, Sean Scully, Resistance and Persistence: Selected Writings, London, 2006, p. 36).