Quotes from Sean Scully

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.

I was doing an interview with a curator, and he asked me to sum up art in one word. Before he even finished asking the question, I said, 'Impurity.' Because that's it.

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

I look at my paintings for a very long time before letting them out of my studio. I like to get on the treadmill and look around at all of my paintings while I exercise. I try to stare them down to make them reveal their weaknesses. If they reveal weaknesses, they get repainted.

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.

When I was a teenager, I was very political.

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

I work on stretched linen canvas, sized so that the surface already has a sense of tension when I begin. It is a very rich and reactive surface. I begin by drawing on the canvas with a kind of loose line, very simply and freely. I paint very thinly, which allows me to change the drawing if I want to.

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.

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

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

I started at school. When I painted, all the girls would come and sit around me. I realised that this was a really good way to get girlfriends.

My art is based on impurity. You have to mix things from different refined cultures to get something raw, to make it go again.

Art is transformative. It's not 2+2=4. It works like the sea. It changes geography through its constant and relentless movement, just the way plants and water shape the world.

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

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.

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 am a very spiritual person: I could say a Catholic with a strong underpinning of Zen.

I'm Irish in the mythic, romantic sense, but in the living sense, I'm a Londoner.

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 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.