I live in a very rural part of New York State surrounded by farms. The landscape influences my work, but not always in the ways you might imagine. I pass this farm on a back road to the next town. I have stopped a few times to photograph it. What I really love is how the corn crib looks in front of the silo. It is a curved grid in front of a curved grid. In this photo it appears quite abstract. I love a subject that is completely real and seems completely abstract.

From the start, I knew that I wanted to make paintings from the broken television "grid" photographs, but they posed a lot of technical difficulties. To begin with,  I paint in oils. Making a clean stripe in oil is more difficult than with acrylic paint. With acrylics you can mask out your stripes with tape and then seal it with a clear acrylic layer, then add your color and it won't bleed. That pretty much insures that you will have a sharp edge.

My paintings are about  light.

When I paint representationally and I am about the business of rendering light, I often choose a subject that is backlit. It seems to offer the most extensive and complex qualities of light - light on a surface, passing through a surface, reflecting off of a surface, often highlighting transparency, translucency, reflection, or glitter.

Several years ago as I crossed the Mall in Washington on my way back to my hotel, I decided I had to duck into the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, part of the Smithsonian, and see the Asian work there. On display was the Price Collection, on loan from Los Angeles. The first piece I saw as I entered the exhibition was "Pine and Plum Trees in Snowstorm" by Katsu Jagyoku, the 18th Century Japanese artist.

The room was dimmed and soft light fell on an enormous screen with branches and falling snow. I felt completely enveloped by the piece. I had both a calm and emotional response to it, a feeling that has stayed with me to this day.

As a child during my summers at the beach, I spent many hours contemplating the ocean; watching the color change from gray to azure blue, and the surface from turbulent to the flatness of a polished mirror. This time of observation felt purposeful, as though, if I sat long enough I could penetrate its meaning or more accurately, its being. How the ocean looked attached itself to a mood and an atmosphere.  It felt as though it had meaning apropos of nothing. How something looked was important.  It struck a deep chord in me.  The most "important" looks were the ones that I was least able to describe. I think that is why now I spend so much time trying to paint the un-paintable: hoar frost, silvery light, light reflected off of surfaces.

EVERYTHING IS REAL is a group of paintings that are both abstract and representational. Each image in the series exists in the real world – an old board of insulation, an industrial garage door, a silo and corn crib, a track in the mud and wrapped cargo on pallets.

At the same time, each has been composed to accentuate the inherently abstract qualities of the reflective surfaces and their interplay with light.

I come from a family that had copious amounts of china.  There was informal china and formal china, china for the beach house, salad plates, dessert plates, bread plates, luncheon plates and dinner plates. Cups with two handles for consume and cups with one handle for coffee, and demi-tasse cups and on and on. Despite having china for every possible occasion or combination of food, it was almost never used. It was considered too precious and belonging to someone else -- as much of it was inherited. In an effort to counter act that, at least once a year I pull out all the china and use it for a big party. In this case, I tend to try to make the food match the china, rather than visa verse. I have not mastered a tomato aspic, although the china is screaming out for it.

One year, after the party and before I put away the dishes I decided to pile the plates on a table and make a still life out of it. I had been painting piled up newspapers and recycled cans, this just seemed to be one more thing I could pile up. And, in deed, I didn't stop with the plates, but also added crysta

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.

You know when there is a painter you really love, where everything about their work excites you and you go in the studio and spend all your time trying to avoid that person's work? Well, for a long time I felt that way about Janet Fish, especially when I first started painting representationally. One day I decided that the only way to find out what my painting was about was to try to make the most Fishesque paintings that I could. So, first, just in case you are not familiar, let me show you her work.