31 Quotes by Sean Scully

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.

The power of a painting has to come from the inside out, not the outside in. It's not just an image. It's an image with a body and that body has to contain its spirit...What's behind it decides everything. How it starts will define how it ends.

I do believe abstraction is and was meant to embody deep emotion. I believe that's its job, in the history of art.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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