Sean Scully

“I've always wanted my art to be global rather than local. I want to make paintings that people everywhere can relate to.”

“Imagine a world without art: it's George Orwell's nightmare!”

“After my son died, I went to a psychiatrist. He proved - or I proved - that Sigmund Freud was correct when he said that the Irish are impervious to psychoanalysis.”

“That's the job of art: to undo the logic of the world.”

“My childhood was extremely unhappy. That's not to say that my parents didn't love me. But it was traumatic, and of course, art doesn't come out of rosy gardens. It comes out of damage.”

“I was the only one to go to university, and the last thing my dad wanted was for me to be an artist. But later on, when I bought him a house in the south of Spain, he thought it was all right then.”

“I was always artistic - right from childhood - but my love of painting came a bit later. It followed my love of music.”

“My father was a genius footballer, a natural, two-footed centre-forward who had played for Arsenal juniors, but he was sent out to work aged 14 and so lived out his life in a frustrated, rageful way.”

“I think that I make chords when I paint, so I think you would be listening to the cello. It's deep, and it's resonant. A lot of people have compared me to Brahms - that slightly melancholic sensuality that's highly structured. Well, that describes my work right there.”

“I'm quite a social person, quite a communicator, and I like to have the work of other people around.”

“Painting is profoundly emotional. When I finish a painting, I'm usually extremely sad.”

“When I got into art school, I thought it was paradise. I wanted to be an artist so much that I was really driven and nothing could stop me.”

“My job is to return abstraction to the people: in a sense, to popularize it without lowering the bar, which is a lot easier said than done.”

“If you stand over on the edge of the west coast of Ireland and look west, you are looking at something you can't see, only imagine. You know America is there, and you can imagine it being there. But you're also looking into infinity, because you can see nothing.”

“I'm really in the business of unifying these two tendencies that have been at odds in our human history for a very long time: the logical and the romantic.”

“As a child, the most important people in my life were my pet rabbit and Mary, mother of Jesus.”

“I probably use more grays than any other artist in the history of art.”

“I don't think writers should have writer's block. I think they should write. Imagine you were a bus driver and you said, 'I've got bus driver's block.' Get over it.”

“When I was a teenager, I was very political.”

“When I was a young kid at art school, I loved the sensual geometry of Poliakoff, which, of course, is inherent in my own work.”