Yes, I really am painting garbage. I didn't set out to paint garbage. I didn't wake up one morning and say painting garbage would be a good thing to do. Instead, while walking near a friend's house in Sasebo, Japan, I passed the recycling center. In it they were moving bales of recycled paper to prepare them for transport. The image of their surface was striking to me, like a Harnett trompe l'oeil painting, and the structure of the bales made me think of Don Judd's boxes.

MK:  When you were a child did you go to museums?  Pay attention to the art in your home?

LP:   When I was very young I used to pour over my parents’ two art books. One was Fifty Centuries of Art from the Metropolitan Museum, and the other was a survey of American art. What I felt when looking through those books was that I wanted to live inside a painting. We lived just outside of New York City, and my mother took me to my first museum exhibition when I was nine or so. It was a retrospective of Turner at the Modern. I remember feeling when I walked through the rooms that I wanted to know everything about what I was seeing, but I wanted to get that information directly from the paintings. I was not one to read labels.

Shushan is a tiny hamlet in upstate New York located on the famous trout fishing river the Battenkill. We don't have much in the way of industry as the shirt and collar factories were burnt down at the turn of the century by none other than our police chief -- Shushan hasn't had a policeman since. But what we still do have is a lot of farming.

A few years ago Michael Yezzi and Jennifer Small bought a large farm  at the top of a hill overlooking the Battenkill where they raise heritage pigs mostly for the New York City restaurant market. These pigs come in a range of colors and are smaller than contemporary pigs. I tend to see the world through the filter of art history and one of the pigs reminded me of the above drawing that I mistakenly thought was by Albrecht Dürer, but is actually by Hans Hofmann, who was considered in the school of Dürer.