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.

Several years ago I decided that I wanted to do a set of lithographs based on a painting I did of an almond tree.  Having never made a lithograph before I thought I'd share the process with you and get your input along the way.

I made 4-plate lithograph, that I printed in different colors to represent different times of the day.  

I was raised to think that art history evolved linearly - a straight line from Giotto to Pollock. I was not prepared for the halting, meandering movement of a career in art, where you race forward with one idea, re-track steps, add something new, abandon a direction and end up end up in the middle of a hi-way clover wondering which way to go.

Even a child needs a room of her own. Mine was a square of light on the floor of the living room. At dawn, I opened one of my parent’s two art books and placed it in the square. The dust lit by the eastern morning light swirled before me as I squatted akimbo; my knees bent flat to the floor in the shape of an M. I leaned my torso forward and pressed my face into the color reproductions of Fifty Centuries of Art. Here in the tiny landscapes behind Roger Van Der Weyden’s Madonna and the curtained Dutch rooms of Vermeer, worlds opened up to me that are at once more vivid and appealing than the one I lived in.

Like Alice, I longed to be on the other side. I wanted to live inside a painting.

The last time I was a resident at A.I.R Vallauris in 2008, I left a box of materials. This time I decide not to take any materials with me and to just make use of what is in the box and whatever I find in the street. I have two notions about how to use my time. One, is to experiment, respond to the moment and not plan everything out. The other is to look at Goya's paintings and see if there is a way to distill their essence into something abstract. I didn't expect to do these two things together. When I open the box, I have plenty of paint, some brushes, and several pieces of 300 lb Fabriano watercolor paper. But what really excites me, is the box itself. It sat in a dry shed for eight years. The cardboard is soft and no longer has much structural strength. One side is white. I tear off one of the flaps and start painting.

Nine years ago I spent seven weeks as an artist-in-residence at AIR Vallauris, which is walking distance to the Mediterranean. One of the advantages of returning to a residency is that you already know where everything is; where to buy food, get your laundry done, and buy materials. You can hit the ground running.

When I first arrived in Vallauris I started photographing immediately. I knew that my eyes are freshest when I first land in a place and even after a day or two I can become visually immune to the environment.I was looking for something very specific. I wanted my subjects to appear abstract, and I wanted them to have layered and visually ambiguous space.That is not how things started for me in Vallauris. The first thing that caught my eye were the utility boxes that are inserted into the side of a building.

Artist collaboratives can be a tricky business, but try doing it with neither the internet or even a computer. Years ago I collaborated with the brilliant, contemporary composer Henry Brant on a piece called "Inside Track", which was played at the Holland Festival. My part in it was that I made slides of dozens of paintings on paper that were displayed on four projectors, which were "played" by two percussionists. Since the piece was performed in Holland, I never got to see it.Let's break down that last sentence. "I made dozens of slides." We are talking about real slides, physical slides; slides that take a week to process in a film lab; slides made out of film and cardboard, that can't be cropped, but rather have to be taped with physical tape to block out anything you don't want the viewer to see. "The slides were 'played' on four projectors"; yes,  these were slide projectors, all mechanical, nothing electronic about them. They were noisy, had different lenses, could overheat and burn the slide. Or if you used the projection long enough, the slide just faded or turned brown. The button to forward the slides was not always reliable, nor was it easy to control the speed of the advancement.  The percussionists must have been very talented.

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

 As a child I spent my summers on Fire Island in my Grandfather's four story Victorian "cottage" on the ocean front.  He bought it at the turn of the last century in Edith Wharton's time.

Each night during dinner the sun set directly down the center of the window of the dining room.  When my Grandfather lived there, even though it was summer, dinner was a formal affair.

By the time my family took over the dining room table, the white linen suits were long gone, replaced by wet bathing suits and bare feet.  I sat next to my Dad and on the other side of the table a built-in cabinet was filled with formal pink and white china and Cranberry glassware.  We never touched it. 

Then one summer my mother packed it up and took it home.  That winter, in a storm much like this one, the "cottage", a monument to a by gone era, was washed into the ocean.

Little do I remember of the astronomy lecture I attended twenty some years ago on a warm summer night in an observatory on what may be the last densely wooded tract of land in Cambridge. What I do remember is that the lecture put me in a kind of swoon. For the first time in my life, science and poetry became one. Somehow a talk on chaos theory and its relation to the order of the universe – randomness as the predictable and necessary precursor to design – had the heft and elegance and perspicacity of a poem you want to memorize or a painting you don’t want to leave. 

Leslie Parke’s paintings live at the same intersection where patterns court chaos, abstraction approaches the figurative and stasis hovers on the cusp of implosion. Her paintings are charged by contradictions: impersonal grids softened by sunlight; watery washes with metallic spikes; a cathedral of squiggles above a perfectly triangular black hole; the aurora borealis in a zip lock bag. 

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.

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.