Sean Scully (born in 1945) is one of the leading painters of our time. His career has been built on an apparently simple recipe of painted stripes and bars, and yet these bricks of colour offer unsettlingly complex possibilities. When Scully writes, his ideas work their own slow magic, and behind the deadpan delivery lurks a concise and considered understanding of the nature of painting and what it means to be an artist in the twenty-first century. This unprecedented collection of Scully writings, interspersed with superb reproductions of the artist's paintings, includes his thoughts on Matisse, Morandi, Newman, Rothko and Van Gogh, alongside lectures given on his own work and his musings on such varied themes as life, love, colour, criticism, creativity and the machinations of the international art world.