Untitled (Study for Signal)

"The pastels, those big pastels that I make, are very monumental...They have a physicality, but they have the physicality of powder...or chalk, whereas the paintings are shiny, inherently shiny...One doesn't get the sense with a pastel that it has an outer skin, that it has a beginning and an end. It seems, well, it's powder, so one is chasing its outer and inner extremitites when one's looking at it, because you don't really know where it starts and wher it ends"
(S. Scully quoted in N. Rifkin (ed.), Sean Scully: Twenty years 1976-1995, London, 1995, p. 79).